Welcome to the Homepage of the
IUPAC CPEP Subcommittee on
Electronic Data Standards

What is the SEDS?

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has a long history in the development and support of scientific data standards. In 1995 IUPAC took over responsibility for the JCAMP-DX range of scientific standards from the Joint Committee on Atomic and Molecular Physical Data (JCAMP).

Since then a IUPAC Working Party has had responsibility for the support and development of the JCAMP-DX scientific data standards. In 2003 due to the increasing interest in the use of the Extensible Markup Language for data exchange the Working Party evolved into the Subcommittee for Electronic Data Standards with oversight duties within IUPAC for all activities in either the JCAMP-DX sphere or the XML in Chemistry area. This Homepage continues to be dedicated to the JCAMP-DX standards. It includes pages dealing with individual projects related to technique-specific data standards as well as generic issues being handled by the Subcommittee directly.

Why is the SEDS needed?

There are worrying gaps in the coverage of known chemistry by reference spectroscopic databases, which are unlikely to be filled by the activities of the commercial sector alone. The IS-DB offers the scientific community the opportunity to share their spectra and develop a vital resource for future generations. Such a collection of spectra will help to provide significant improvements in human health, new materials, environmental protection, sustainable development and educational progress.

XML in Chemistry

XML in Chemistry is a new IUPAC initiative to bring a degree of regulation to this important and rapidly expanding field. We aim to facilitate the validation of data dictionaries for various groups developing ontologies expressed in XML in the broad field of Chemistry. This will help to reduce duplication of effort around the world and allow development projects to build on the work previous groups concentrating on their own innovative goals rather than wasting time and effort re-inventing wheels!.

We need your help!

IUPAC encourages the submission of projects in all areas of chemistry relevant to its work. If you believe there is a need for a new scientific data standard in your field and wish to know more about how to form a limited term task group to get the standard developed please contact the subcommittee.

News & Notices 

JCAMP-DX to Origin - A tool has been made available by the Institute for Analytical Science in Dortmund to help chemometricians and other users of statistical packages import numeric data from JCAMP-DX files. There are two utilities available for downloading on the ISAS web site under the URL:

http://www.ansci.de/downloads/jcamp/

The JCAMP to ASCII executable and the JCAMP-DLL itself have been made available with the respective source code. The JCAMP-DLL was tested under the Windows 98, NT4 2000 and XP operating systems. The utilities were tested on Origin 6.0, and 7.0 as well as with Origin Pro versions 6.1, 7.0 and 7.5.
For more information see the accompanying article in the October/November edition of Spectroscopy Europe.

XML in Chemistry - new IUPAC initiative to bring a degree of regulation to this important and rapidly expanding field.

Future Projects
 

Conferences

In order to ensure the widest distribution of information the working party tries to attend the major international conferences in the fields in which work is currently being undertaken or planned. Some presentations are stored on this site for information and we will try to maintain a list of future presentations so you will know where you can meet members of the working party or the task groups face to face. 

We are always willing to attend conferences if requested so if you think this would benefit your scientific field or simply wish to learn more about our programs get in touch.

Links of Interest

Links to JCAMP-DX related sites, from academic information  to manufacturers information on their implementations of the JCAMP-DX protocols can be found in this area

Drafts

Draft documents which are currently open for comment can be found here. The pages on this site are intentionally short and simple (frameless and free of graphics) and should be readable with any browser. If you encounter any difficulties in accessing any part of this site or would like to make any comments or suggestions, please contact the web manager. Many of the pages available in the site require at least Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 to view. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or better, you will need to download it before viewing these pages.

Page last modified 22 April 2007. 
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