The most powerful
X-ray laser facilities as well as multiple 4th generation
synchrotron light sources are in user operation across the Europe. Preparation
for the European spallation source is ramping up, more photon and neutron (PaN)
facilities are planning upgrades. With the excellent brightness, larger and
faster detectors enormous volumes of scientific data are produced. The variety
of experiments as well as PaN user communities are broadening, publishing
practices and academic institutions requirements for scientific data management,
including interest in open-data, are increasing. In late 2018, within the European
Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative, several major European PaN facilities
started a project called PaNOSC [1], which was complemented by ExPaNDS [2] project at the
national research PaN institutes a one year later. Both projects aim for
expanding scientific data catalogues and analysis services in order to make scientific
data at PaN facilities comply with the FAIR data principles. This includes
adjustments to scientific data policies, extension of scientific data retention
period, tools to search for datasets of possible scientific or scholar interest,
improvements of data accessibility, data formats and metadata catalogues and
finally a possibility to reproduce the scientific results by means of remote
data analysis services. Within the wide scope of the projects several
application use cases have been chosen to prototype all the services including
data analysis. The selected scientific use cases cover multiple methods
including crystallography, for the ExPaNDS project in particular serial
crystallography [3], CryoEM and powder diffraction [4], but also
other techniques as small angle scattering, reflectometry or ptychographic
X-ray computed tomography [5]. The use cases represent several types of PaN
sciences analysis workflows including Python Jupyter notebooks, conventional
high-performance distributed computing, cloud-like containerization for
data-science and remote desktops for visualization. The idea is to match the
environments to run scientific software with archived datasets and records in
metadata catalogues. The projects outcomes include definition of application
interfaces and a functional protype that can be deployed at research
facilities, can be interconnected with other tools, developed and extended in a
sustainable way, allowing to bridge more scientific data into EOSC.