LABORATORY INFORMATICS


Supporting standards


SOPHIA KTORI DISCUSSES THE IMPLEMENTATION OF DATA STANDARDS FOR LABORATORY INFORMATICS


accelerating uptake and optimisation of the standard and its utilisation. And this industry drive has become self-propelling, which further aids uptake. Standards such as SiLA are not enforceable. But if potential users can take part in


development and witness the benefits first hand, then they jump on board.’ Juchli suggested that just in 2019, more companies were working on SiLA projects than had been doing so over the rest of the past decade.


There has been a noticeable leap in the realisation that data formats, and the application of


open standards in particular, will play a huge role in the seamless integration and future-proofing of the digital laboratory. That’s the view of Daniel Juchli, chief technical officer at SiLA Consortium, and head of Lab & Research Informatics at life science consultancy wega Informatik, based in Switzerland. ‘In order to achieve the goal of


generating FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data, and enabling true, plug and play interoperability, labs must look to open, community-driven data formats and instrument communication standards, such as AnIML and SiLA.’ A true standard must be widely


accepted in industry, but to be so it should also be open and royalty free. SiLA (standards in laboratory automation) is an open standard that is represented by a non-profit organisation, but more importantly, also by a community of end- users, software and instrument vendors who are driving SiLA’s evolution and trialling the tools and utilities that will be required to make instruments compliant with the standard, Juchli stated. ‘Parallel to the SiLA organisation, industry is


14 Scientific Computing World February/March 2020


Increasing adoption The release of the instrument communication standard SiLA 2 last year has made it easier for people to work on real-world projects, Juchli explained. ‘We now have vendors knocking on the SiLA door, asking to implement the standard. It will only be a matter of time before the first commercial products are out there with full SiLA 2 support. Encouragingly, SiLA and AnIML [analytical information markup language] fit well together, so there are now robust, vendor-neutral standards for managing how instruments connect and communicate, and for husbanding and viewing the data that they produce.’ Critically, the SiLA organisation has made great strides to ensure complete transparency in development of the standard. ‘Everything has public visibility, you can see the complete process of development and decision making. This transparency aids uptake, because potential users can see how the result is derived from input of potentially hundreds of companies to refine and hone.’ Understanding and uptake have been aided by the simple fact that interoperable technology is now so much a part of everyday life – think how smartphones and tablets connect with each other, and to


printers, headphones, speakers etc. ‘Plug and play is expected, and this expectation of interoperability has started to penetrate the laboratory environment.’ SiLA enables this communication


between different service systems in the lab, such as balances, LIMS or ELN systems, Juchli noted. ‘SiLA represents a kind of microservice architecture. To do this SiLA introduces the concept of a feature definition language, to describe those services, in terms of their abilities, what data they may consume or produce, which interaction models they support, and even the messages, commands and actions that they provide, in a localised user language. Importantly, these feature definition languages can be generated by the average scientist in the lab, and are still machine readable. They don’t require any IT experience or knowhow. It’s kind of the glue between the business and the IT worlds.’ Ultimately, this means that the product manager of a spectrophotometer or chromatography data system can easily create feature definitions that describe


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