6th September 2019. Wayforlight.eu is a user-oriented web-portal integrating all European light sources (synchrotron, free electron laser and optical laser sources). It offers a standardized database to retrieve up-to-date information on the facilities, beamlines and their instrumentation. A set of advanced search tools allow filtering by scientific discipline, technique and the most relevant parameters used in experiments. Users can now browse more than 300 beamlines at 38 facilities, fine-tuning their search for the most suitable and complementary instruments for their future experiments.
The portal is addressed to both academic and industrial users, having a section for companies and a dedicated single entry point for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This type of companies can get free access to more than 10 facilities funded by the CALIPSOplus project, whose corresponding work package devoted to SMEs access is led by the ALBA Synchrotron and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF).
The database was designed and developed at Elettra Synchrotron (Italy). It offers a set of Advanced Programming Interfaces (APIs) allowing the automatic synchronization of the information provided by each facility. This ensures standardization of the technical specifications and avoids multiple data entry into different platforms, favoring the long-term sustainability of the catalogue.
