Revolutionizing data access through new software tool: Tiled Posted on : Nov 25 - 2021

Every time scientists study a new material for future batteries or investigate diseases to develop new drugs, they must wade through an ocean of data. Today, a whole ecosystem of scientific tools creates a wild variety of data to be explored. This exploration will now get a lot easier thanks to scientists at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), located at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory. Their freshly rolled-out software tool—called Tiled—allows researchers to see, slice, and study their data more conveniently than ever before. This new data access tool makes finding and analyzing the right piece of data a walk in the park compared to previous methods, paving the way for the next scientific breakthrough.

As one of the 28 DOE Office of Science user facilities across the Nation, NSLS-II welcomes nearly 2,000 scientists each year to use its ultrabright light, tackling the greatest challenges in materials and life science. These visiting researchers come from around the globe to collaborate with experts and use the one-of-a-kind research tools at NSLS-II. They zap their samples, ranging from ancient rocks to novel quantum materials, with intense X-rays and catch outgoing signals using advanced detectors. In turn, these detectors spit out streams of data, waiting to be analyzed by scientists.

"Working with data is a central part of all research, and yet a challenge on its own. It comes in a multitude of formats, in varying sizes and shapes, and not every piece of it is useful for the researchers. This is why developing a software tool that makes accessing, seeing, and sorting through data so important," said Dan Allan, computational scientist at NSLS-II.

Tiled is a data access service for data-aware portals and data science tools. This means that Tiled sits atop databases and file systems so that scientists can access their data through, for example, a web browser or data analysis software. While the Data Science and Systems Integration (DSSI) program rolled out Tiled to all experimental stations at NSLS-II, the service, just like its cousin project Bluesky (a data acquisition software also developed at NSLS-II), can be used in any research laboratory around the globe. This is possible because Tiled is published under a popular open-source software license.

"Even though we developed Tiled in the programming language Python and, therefore, it integrates naturally with data science libraries based on Python, nothing about the service is Python-specific," said Stuart Campbell, chief data scientist at NSLS-II. "The client uses an API, or application programming interface, to connect the user applications with the server. An API is basically a set of rules, or a contract that defines how different software pieces communicate with each other. The great thing about this approach is that once these rules and interfaces are defined, it provides users and developers the structure within which they can build some excellent tools and expand the functionality beyond that which we had originally imagined." View more