Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
a bolt of a particular size, and tools match the dimensions of their associated
fasteners. One benefi t of standards is that if they are internationally adopted
manufacturers of products can cater to a limited number of variants, thereby
reducing overheads such as retooling. However, this is often not the case and
standards are commonly national in nature. In Europe the metric standard of
meters and kilograms is well established, while in the United States miles and
pounds prevails. Our free-trade partner bordering our nation (United States),
Canada, has adopted the metric system. Standards which are geographical in
nature and represent such a “localized approach” will fail when data are
expected to traverse organizational boundaries across the world and be mobile
between multiple software applications.
As this chapter is written, World Standards Week, as organized by the
American National Standards Institute (ANSI), has begun. This year national
standards day was on September 23, 2010. All kinds of industries have adopted,
are working on, or are renewing their standards on an ongoing basis following
iterative gap analyses in capabilities and the need to support changes in tech-
nology. Many of these industries seek approval from the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO) (http://webstore.ansi.org/SdoInfo.
aspx?sdoid
39 ). Certifi cation against such standards can be essential in indus-
trial competitiveness. The United States also hosts the National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST), which promotes measurement science,
standards, technology, and industrial competitiveness.
In regards to the aims of this topic there is a long history of standards
development in the biomedical sciences. In terms of the domain of collabora-
tion in informatics to benefi t the life sciences we need to consider standards
specifi cally for chemistry and biology. In chemistry specifi cally, efforts have
been made to establish standards that allow for systematic nomenclature
generation using the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
(IUPAC) rule standards [1], those that allow for the exchange of spectral data
using the Joint Committee on Atomic and Molecular Physical Data (JCAMP)
standard [2-4], and those that allow for chemical structure interchange and
linking using the IUPAC International Chemical Identifi er (InChI) [5]. Even
chemical textbooks are labeled with the International Standard Serial Number
(ISSN), which is used for many types of topics. As for standards in biology
there are many that have been developed around data sets (see Table 13.1).
One could also focus on systems biology which has CellML as an open
Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard, Systems Biology Markup
Language (SBML) for machine-readable representations of networks, Systems
Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN) for human-readable representations of
biological networks, and fi nally BioPAX, a data exchange format for biological
pathways [6] .
The IUPAC naming conventions for chemicals mentioned previously are
applicable to small molecules such as ligands and metabolites, and the
Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) standards for handling hazard-
ous chemicals (http://www.osha.gov/Publications/osha3084.html) are essential
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