Target audience

Who is the target audience of the ocdb package? Is it interesting for me?

The ocdb package addresses all scientists and people in general interested in scattering and absorption of photons in the VUV/EUV/X-ray region, in particular (potential) users of the data contained in the Optical Constants Database (OCDB) provided by the German National Metrology Institute, the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, PTB.

In contrast to other packages and data sources, the OCDB (and hence the ocdb Python package) provides not only optical constants, but uncertainties for these values as well. As such, it does not compete with other data sources (e.g., the CXRO database) and Python packages (e.g., periodictable), but supplements and extends the data available from there.

Besides that, it provides programmatic access to both, data and metadata, in a way similar to the periodictable Python package. For further details and a first glimpse of the user interface, have a look at the use cases section.