Towards efficient data exchange within the Combustion Community

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 21.3px; text-align: justify; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} li.li2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: justify; font: 12.0px 'Times New Roman'; -webkit-text-stroke: #000000} span.s1 {font-kerning: none} span.s2 {font: 12.0px Helvetica} In close collaboration with the participants of the European COST Action CM1404, Chemistry of Smart Energy Carriers and Technology, a project is underway to catalog the needs of the combustion community in terms of efficient data exchange within the community. In contrast to other efforts in data exchange, the focus is not on specifying specific data formats, but rather to catalog and categorise what data exists within the community, from raw data to published results, and examine the quality and usefulness of exchange between collaborators. The focus is on what data can and should be considered and not how that data should be represented. As data exchange (and inclusion in databases) becomes more prevalent, de-facto standards, with the emphasis of plural, will emerge. Some standards have already emerged. Within this project data is categorised in two fundamental layers, published data and the data, not necessarily found in a publication, leading up to the published data. The published data is the final data that appears in the publication of the experiment. This data either appears as tables or figures within the text of the publication, or as more detailed information in supplementary material. The second category is the data that leads up to the published data. This is set of data starting with the raw data collected from the experiment itself through its processing to the final published data. This data could be put into three sub layers: Experiment: Data directly from the device, uninterpreted and unedited. Intermediate: Data that has been process, but basically very device dependent and not necessarily useful to others. In a sense, this is only useful within the research group. Collaboration: Data that is useful to exchange among (knowledgeable?) colleagues and collaborators. A particular focus of the project is to determine the usefulness and quality of experimental ‘raw’ data, starting with data direct from the instrumentation, produced and the problems that need to be overcome for efficient exchange. The impetus for considering exchange of this raw data is accountability, allowing other researchers to verify or reproduce results, the growing need to determine data sensitivity and error and the long term goal of incorporation of electronic laboratory notebooks into the daily work of the experimentalist. Two of the major recognised problems are interpretability (and possibly misinterpretation) of the data and the specificity of the data, due to, for example, instrument specific calibrations and design. Included in this analysis is the interdependency of data, for example, constants used on the path to published results. The results and documents produced by this project will continually evolve as the needs of the data producers and the data users evolve. The emphasis of the project will be not to impose data standards on the community, but to examine and catalog the existing status and standards that currently exist with the community, using the expertise of the participants of the SMARTCATS community (though input from wider sources will always be welcome).