# Welcome to Battery Data Alliance! 👋

**URL:** <https://bda.discourse.group/t/welcome-to-battery-data-alliance/5>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [November 20, 2023, 9:23am UTC](https://bda.discourse.group/t/welcome-to-battery-data-alliance/5 "2023-11-20T09:23:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![system](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/bda.discourse.group/system/32/1_2.png) [@system](https://bda.discourse.group/u/system)\
**Post date:** [November 20, 2023, 9:23am UTC](https://bda.discourse.group/t/welcome-to-battery-data-alliance/5/1 "2023-11-20T09:23:05Z")

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The Battery Data Alliance is a [Linux Foundation Energy](https://lfenergy.org) project. We build open source software and standards for the battery industry — data formats, cycler interfaces, analysis tooling — so that researchers, manufacturers, and engineers can spend their time on batteries instead of fighting incompatible data pipelines.

Battery data comes from everywhere: lab cyclers, field deployments, simulations, published research. None of it works well together. Different equipment vendors, different file formats, different assumptions about what a “cycle” means or how to label a voltage column. Every organization ends up writing the same conversion scripts, the same ingestion code, the same validation logic. BDA exists to solve that problem once, in the open.

Our current work spans two areas:

**Data specification** — the [Battery Data Format](https://github.com/battery-data-alliance/battery-data-format) defines a canonical schema for cycler time-series data, backed by an [ontology](https://github.com/battery-data-alliance/battery-data-format-ontology) aligned with BattINFO/EMMO. The [batterydf](https://pypi.org/project/batterydf/) Python package reads vendor exports, normalizes them to BDF, and validates the result. The [BDF datastore](https://github.com/battery-data-alliance/bdf-datastore) hosts contributed datasets from organizations like SINTEF and Microsoft.

**Cycler control** — open source Python interfaces for communicating with battery test equipment, including [PyMacNet](https://github.com/battery-data-alliance/pymacnet) (Maccor) and [PyCTIArbin](https://github.com/battery-data-alliance/pyctiarbin) (Arbin).

This forum is where the community discusses the spec, coordinates on tooling, and works through the practical problems of making battery data interoperable. If you’re here, you probably already know why this matters — take a look at the [pinned summary of where BDF stands](https://bda.discourse.group/t/bdf-whats-been-built-and-whats-next/55) and jump into any thread that’s relevant to your work.