Objectives:
To create and promulgate ASTM/IUPAC standards for the "Analytical Information Markup Language" (AnIML) for instrument-to-instrument, instrument-to-application, and application-to-application interchange and archiving of analytical chemistry spectroscopy and chromatography data.

Background:
The exchange and storage of analytical chemistry data has long been hampered by multiple, incompatible data formats. Existing data interchange standards, such as ASTM’s ANalytical Data Interchange (ANDI) and IUPAC’s JCAMP-DX (Joint Committee on Atomic and Molecular Physics–Data Exchange) standards, are supported by several commercial software products, but these are pre-web-based technologies that rely upon stand-alone applications to carry out the interchange. While most of these schemes can interchange data from instrument to instrument, data interchange from instrument to application (e.g., importing data from an instrument into an Excel spreadsheet) is not well supported, and application-to-application tasks are not handled at all. New concepts such as electronic laboratory notebooks require simple, common mechanisms for interchanging data from instruments to applications and databases. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is now requiring the retention and accessibility of analytical data on a pharmaceutical throughout and beyond the lifetime of that drug. As the amount of analytical data grows, the worldwide pharmaceutical industry armed only with current electronic data handling methods is losing the battle to meet this requirement. It is imperative that data formats and archiving schemes be developed that are independent of specific hardware and software, that keep the scientific metadata attached to the analytical data themselves, that will be readable in the future, and that are easily transportable into other storage and representational formats as information technology evolves. Other sectors, such as the environmental regulatory and clinical chemistry communities, that depend heavily on analytical chemistry data have similar needs and mandates.

 

Page created October 2008

Web site point of contact