MyTARDIS is a multi-institutional collaborative venture that facilitates the archiving and sharing of data and metadata collected at major facilities such as the Australian Synchrotron and ANSTO and within Institutions.
An example of the benefit of a system such a MyTARDIS in the protein crystallography community is that while the model coordinates and (less often) the structure factors (processed experimental data) are stored in the community Protein Data Bank (PDB) the raw diffraction data is often not available. There are several reasons why this is important, which can be summarised as:
- The availability of raw data is extremely useful for the development of improved methods of image analysis and data processing.
- Fostering the archival of raw data at an institutional level is one the best ways of ensuring that this data is not lost (laboratory archives are typically volatile).
You can get a copy of MyTARDIS from http://code.google.com/p/mytardis/
For installation instructions see Installing MyTARDIS.