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