If you attended the previous XNAT workshop in 2010, or maybe watched some of the videos on the XNAT documentation wiki, you might expect the same sort of traditional lecture presentation: someone talking, with a few examples, everyone else taking notes. But we decided to go instead with what we hope to be a more engaging and practically oriented format this time around. We've also timed the workshop to map closely to our 1.6 release schedule. This means that the workshop will be a great time to engage with the XNAT development team if you're just learning about XNAT, but should also be valuable for our existing users to learn about many of the new features in XNAT 1.6.
The format of the workshop will be oriented around solving a problem with XNAT 1.6. In this case, you'll take the role of a system administrator responsible for rolling out a new XNAT installation to host the BOGUS (Big Open Group Unified Study) project. This will include:
- Defining project requirements
- Creating and installing data type extensions (including the use of community-created data types through modules on the XNAT Marketplace)
- Configuring projects and protocols for the study requirements
- Enabling and customizing site-wide and project-specific anonymization scripts
- Entering and uploading data into the system
- Processing data and creating resource reconstructions with pipelines
- Searching and advanced searching
- Reporting and analysis
All of this will be presented in a step-by-step scenario where you'll get to work hands-on to implement each stage of the project. XNAT developers will be available to work through any issues that arise and the virtual machines provided as part of the workshop collateral will have snapshots that will capture a "clean" implementation of each step as well.
We're excited about this practical approach to presenting XNAT and also eager to get the cool new features in the latest release of XNAT 1.6 into people's hands. The 2012 XNAT Workshop should be a great way to come up to speed on all of these and may help even experienced XNAT hands learn something new!