I am a faculty member at Siena College, an undergraduate-only institution, and a member of the CMS collaboration. I have a strong interest in software and computing challenges as they relate to scientific analysis, outreach, and in-/out-of-the classroom education. For more than 5 years now, I and my co-authors have developed a file description using HDF5 as the underlying file format, [hepfile][1], that is designed to mimic ROOT interactivity. We use it as the basis for our outreach website and I use it in my workflow with CMS and BaBar analyses. It plays well with modern tools like [awkward][2] and we are submitting this project to JOSS later this month. We are very interested in the community's perspective on this project in general as well as the details of its implementation. 


  [1]: https://hepfile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html
  [2]: https://awkward-array.org/doc/main/