The ACS 2013 symposium on exchangeable data formats

The article reflects on the symposium for the Chemical Information Division (CINF) of the American Chemical Society at the 246^th ACS National Meeting and Exposition, held over September 8-12, 2013 at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis. Phil McHale noted in his presentation that Perkin-Elmer was working on an Open XML format for export of data from Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELN). At present these were generally proprietary. Michel Boruta followed by showing the transition from hand-written annotations on chart paper copies of spectra to electronic equivalents that could be stored in knowledge bases. Stuart Chalk introduced the AnIML specification and highlighted the features and benefits of using an XML protocol that could be fully validated. The main points included more than 1000 new RMs produced by them during the past year; some new guidance documents; a few new accredited RM producers; and considerable training activities.