ASTM/IUPAC Standards for Exchange and Archiving of Instrument Data and NIST Chemical Reference Data – AnIML
Principal Investigator: Gary Kramer
(301) 975-4132
gary.kramer@nist.gov
Objectives:
-Complete the initial documentation for AnIML Version 1.0 suite of standards so that we can initiate the ASTM balloting process for AnIML.
- Broaden interactions and contacts with industrial software developers who will incorporate AnIML into their company's products.
- Expand development effort from a solely volunteer-driven effort to include substantial industry and customer involvement and resources allowing use of paid professionals, where feasible, to expedite the completion of AnIML.
Background:
Managers across the private and public sectors who rely on analytical chemical information to make informed decisions face challenges dealing with the data that underlie such information. One challenge is getting the data from where it is generated to where it converted into information. This involves not just data transport, but the "interuseability" of the data's format—what we like to call instrument-to-instrument, instrument-to-application, and application-to-application data interchange. A second, increasingly urgent issue involves maintaining the chemical analysis information and its supporting data and metadata in an accessible, useable form over the long term. This is especially important for the manufacturing sector where such records about long-lived products such as aircraft or pharmaceuticals must be maintained not solely for technical specification, quality assurance, and product liability concerns, but also to comply with regulatory mandates. The need for long term chemical data accessibility and availability is much wider than just that of the manufacturing realm, environmental laboratories, clinical laboratories (along with much of the healthcare sector), and even R&D domains have similar needs. Thirdly, new technologies demand increased accessibility to and availability of analytical chemical information. Modern data-mining techniques can be used to seek answers to new questions from old data, but only if such data are electronically accessible. Electronic laboratory notebooks are rapidly replacing their paper counterparts and increasingly need standard mechanisms to import instrument data and metadata and export processed results. AnIML has been designed to be a solution to problems of interchanging and archiving analytical chemistry result data and its metadata. As the industrial need for AnIML has grown, so too have the demands from industry to bring it to fruition in a timely manner. Despite the poor current economic climate, we are now seeing greater interest from industry, especially from the manufacturers of scientific instruments who will incorporate AnIML into their products, in providing resources to complete the initial AnIML standards. We are also working with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Army Corp of Engineers to incorporate AnIML into the fourth stage of the reporting protocols for the EPA's Contract Laboratory Program (CLP). This is a very important development for the AnIML team because if the EPA incorporates AnIML into their Staged Electronic Document Delivery (SEDD) protocol, they will, through contracts, mandate its use by all the EPA Contract Laboratories. Furthermore, an EPA effort is currently underway to make SEDD the a standard protocol for all EPA analytical result reporting, not just that for the CLP.
