TARDIS and MyTARDIS (for public and private data respectively) is currently in 
production at the Australian Synchrotron and has just received funding to 
expand to working with all data being produced from all beamlines (not just 
macromolecular) - and also to all instruments at the Australian nuclear 
facility ANSTO.

One of the major drawcards of this system is that for users of the Australian 
Synchrotron there is zero barrier to entry as far as data cataloguing and 
access. Once the frames come off the beamline, their headers are extracted and 
catalogued in a database. This is all accessible for download anywhere today 
via the web portal http://tardis.synchrotron.org.au under one's synchrotron 
user account. Information is gathered from the proposal and scheduling systems 
at the facility and fed to this MyTARDIS node, so there is literally nothing a 
user *has* to enter to have their data described and accounted for in the 
system.

Furthermore, an instance of MyTARDIS can be set up at the lab or institution to 
receive a local copy of the data and metadata. For instance, if a 
crystallographer from Melbourne university has a MyTARDIS set up in their lab, 
the MyTARDIS node at the Australian Synchrotron detects if new data off a 
beamline is owned by this crystallographer and sends a copy of all data and its 
associated metadata for download through a local web portal - under their 
regular university login system. A sharing interface allows crystallographers 
to grant access to fellow researchers so that they can also download data and 
browse/search through metadata.

Later on, a user will be able to add datasets with results and log files to 
these catalogued raw diffraction datasets and publish them. Published data 
appears in the central index TARDIS.edu.au and contains a persistent handle for 
citation. No data is actually stored at this central index: TARDIS.edu.au 
simply provides rich metadata and download links to federated MyTARDIS nodes 
and their stored data.

There are plans to have (at least) the first diffraction image converted to JPG 
or PNG and stored/displayed by the web portal (as Andreas mentioned), as well 
as crystal quality ranking and other (eg. XDS) processing.

As a final note, while the preferred method of data storage in TARDIS is the 
zero-effort one via synchrotrons, there's a method of manually depositing 
diffraction datasets, irrespective of date or origin. See: 
http://tardis.edu.au/deposit for more details.

A mailing list (Google Group) has just been set up for discussion of 
TARDIS/MyTARDIS. Feel free to join in to keep abreast of changes and discuss 
finer points of the solution:

http://groups.google.com/group/tardis-users

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