Program origins

pyXSD was authored by Kali Norby while working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as a summer intern in 2006 under the Higher Education Research Experiences at ORNL (HERE@ORNL) program. The program is run by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE). Kali’s mentors that summer were Thomas Schulthess, Michael Summers, and Paul Kent. Kali was working in the Computational Materials Science Group, which is in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division.

pyXSD was created in order to help bring XML into use as a group standard. XML serves as a common input/output format for data in the group. pyXSD also replaces many of the older tools, often written in FORTRAN, with transforms. Paul Kent assisted Kali with the approach to the transforms that he wrote for the group. Michael Summers came up with the technical approach to the program. He and Kali are the program’s co-authors.

The program was made open source under a BSD license at the end of the internship. The pyXSD website was stored on an ORNL server run by Michael Summers, and the project was maintained by Kali Norby.

Transcribed from the 0.1 doc/origins.rst (September 2006), with dead links repaired. This history is preserved as part of the project record.