Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
13
STANDARDS FOR COLLABORATIVE
COMPUTATIONAL TECHNOLOGIES
FOR BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH
SEAN EKINS , ANTONY J. WILLIAMS , AND MAGGIE A. Z. HUPCEY
13.1
What Are Standards? 201
13.2
Why We Need Standards for Collaboration 204
13.3
How Will We Get Them? 206
References 207
13.1
WHAT ARE STANDARDS?
Standards are a common way to ensure quality or provide a measure to which
others should conform. Some everyday examples include weights and mea-
sures and railway track train gauges (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_gauge)
and clearly standards are of value in these areas. There have long been stan-
dards for many specifi c domains and, for example, historical buildings docu-
ment standards for units of measure such as bread loaf sizes: The exterior walls
of Freiburg Minister in Germany displays different sizes for the years 1270
and 1317. Standards in engineering are important so that, for example, railway
lines join correctly when started from opposite ends of a country, a nut fi ts on
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