The 7th Annual Meeting of ORSO

Jun 23, 2025, 9:00 AM → Jun 27, 2025, 3:30 PM Europe/Paris

Zoom

The seventh annual meeting of the Open Reflectometry Standards Organisation.

The purpose of the meeting is for ORSO administration and to discuss topics of interest to the ORSO community. This year the meeting will take place online and registration is required here.

The program will consist of some scientific and technical talks together with break-out discussions led by chairs of each of the working groups.

There will also be an AGM for ORSO to discuss administrative issues and elect new chairs for the working groups.

Further details on the proposed agenda can be found here.

In advance of the meeting please complete the ORSO Survey

Monday, June 23

Plenary Session

1 Introduction to the meeting

Speaker: Thomas Arnold (European Spallation Source ERIC)

2 Invited talk

To be confirmed

3 Invited talk

To be confirmed

4 Invited talk

5 Summary of Data Analysis Working group activities

6 Summary of Sample Environment Working group activities

Plenary Session

7 Introduction to the meeting

Speaker: Thomas Arnold (European Spallation Source ERIC)

8 Invited talk

To be confirmed

9 Invited talk

To be confirmed

10 Summary of Education and Outreach Working group activities

Speaker: Stefan Kowarik (University of Graz)

11 Summary of Reproducibility Working group activities

12 Summary of Data Formats Working group activities

Speaker: Joshaniel Cooper (European Spallation Source ERIC)

Tuesday, June 24

Breakout sessions: A reference library of data analysis models

13 A reference library of data analysis models

For many users, one of the barriers to modern data analysis tools is the need to have a background in coding. We have begun creating a common model language to make this easier across different platforms but we also think that the creation of a library of example models would be a useful starting point for users to build an appropriate model for their system. This session will therefore:
Review the current status
Review relevant results of the ORSO survey
Discuss how such a library could work in practice
Canvas what types of example would be useful

Breakout sessions: The use of nested sampling in reflectometry

14 Introduction to nested sampling in reflectometry analysis

Whilst Bayesian approaches are now common for estimating posterior distributions (to understand parameter uncertainty), data analyses that obtain the Bayesian evidence term for model selection (which of model A or B is a better way of treating the data?) are much scarcer. Nested sampling is a Bayesian statistical technique for estimating this evidence term, as well as being able to estimate the parameter posterior distribution.

Speakers: Andrew Caruana (STFC), Andrew Nelson (Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation)

15 Discussion

of the possible future uses of nested sampling in reflectometry analysis

Wednesday, June 25

Breakout sessions: Orsopy and a standard model language

16 Orsopy and a standard model language

This session will start a discussion around the model language. The session will aim to understand what is missing from the current definition of the the language, for example, can it be adapted to improve representaion of models for biological systems.

What can be done to improve uptake?

How do we ensure all facilities give users data in .ort format.
What is the added value to users for using this format (The ORSO text format is now reasonably well defined and the orsopy tool is available, but can the decumention be improved).

Finally is there some merit in defining a standard format (or formats) for fit results. There is often a bottleneck after running analysis to get the fit, the SLD profile(s) and the confidence intervals etc out of the analysis software into an appropriate format for publication. The vision here is to add some kind of export funcionality into the analysis software to export those things in formats suitable for common plotting software (Origin, Sigmaplot, Python (Plotly, Matplotlib etc), Matlab etc). This would be similar to the various image formats - not a single format, but a small collections of standard formats.

Breakout sessions: Reproducibility Working Group

17 A checklist for reproducible publishing in reflectometry

Following the successful sessions in previous meetings on generating advice on defining some best practice for reporting results and inputs to Bayesian analysis, we would like to begin a new initiative on publishing a checklist for reproducible publishing in reflectometry. This session will begin with a discussion on how useful and general this would be, and try to define what we think “best paractice” actually is.

18 The round-robin sample

For neutron reflectometry we have, for quite some time, been trying to collect data on a “round-robin” sample to compare neutron instruments. This session will look at the results from this study and recruit volunteers to actually write the paper. We would also like to consider what we would need to make a similar study for Synchrotron beamlines.

Thursday, June 26

Breakout sessions: Intro to the Sample Environment Working Group

Conveners: Ben Humphreys (ILL), Sophie Ayscough (European Spallation Source)

19 General Discussion

We will have a general discussion session on sample environment identifying the user community needs and discussing the response of the ORSO questionnaire (30 minutes)

20 Focus session on SE types

21 Creation of list of Sample Environment for ORSO webpage

This session will focus on population of the Sample Environment ORSO webpages. We wish to build a comprehensive list of environments available at different facilities, and we hope that you will take this time with us to contribute information on available environments at facilities but also novel sample environments by research groups. We would also in general like to build educational pages on sample environment use. Please attend the session if you are interested in contributing and helping to build what would be a valuable resource for the community. (1 hour)

Breakout sessions: ORSO Drop-in help

Convener: Thomas Arnold (European Spallation Source ERIC)

Breakout sessions: Moving towards fully Open Data for Reflectometry

Conveners: Bridget Murphy (Kiel University, Germany), Tom Hase (Warwick University)

Breakout sessions: Intro to the Sample Environment Working Group

Conveners: Ben Humphreys (ILL), Sophie Ayscough (European Spallation Source)

22 General SE discussion 2

23 Focus session on SE types

24 Creation of list of Sample Environment for ORSO webpage

This session will focus on population of the Sample Environment ORSO webpages. We wish to build a comprehensive list of environments available at different facilities, and we hope that you will take this time with us to contribute information on available environments at facilities but also novel sample environments by research groups. We would also in general like to build educational pages on sample environment use. Please attend the session if you are interested in contributing and helping to build what would be a valuable resource for the community. (1 hour)

Friday, June 27

Plenary Session

25 Annual General Meeting

Recruitment of a temporary stand-in chair for the Reproducibility working group (to replace Andrew McCluskey)
Matters Arising

26 Summaries of the breakout sessions

The Scribe from each of the breakout sessions will present a summary of their session

27 Invited talk

To be confirmed