LABORATORY INFORMATICS


Those services then communicate what features they have and can offer.’ A feature is a set of commands that belong together – say, a weighing balance can be instructed to prompt a user to weight a certain amount of sample within a given tolerance. Equally, a LIMS could send a list of samples to a chromatography data system, monitor the measurement progress, and receive the results back in AnIML format. ‘Importantly, its two-way communication between instruments and software through SiLA 2. The instrument responds when the command and action have been completed, and there is also an error-reporting function for when things go wrong.


‘It’s no longer necessary to write files on a PC and pass them from disk to instrument, because the systems intercommunicate using the same language. The actual data generated on an instrument as a result of the instructions can then be wrapped up and posted back across the network.’


”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”


the services that the system is offering. ‘Importantly, this isn’t confined to the life science laboratory,’ Juchli said. ‘You could feasibly create feature definition languages that would match workflows and data in disparate, non-life science industries.’


Combining standards It’s another tier to the overall goal of improving automation, and in the laboratory this isn’t just robotics, it’s about workflow and data flow automation. ‘Add in AnIML, and you not only get instruments talking to each other about what they are doing, but you then have a standard that


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describes the data that they generate and send to other systems in the lab. AnIML’s technique definition functionality defines how the data looks, in a similar way to how the SiLA feature definition defines how to speak to the system,’ Juchli noted. ‘Then you can imagine introducing two systems into the lab that have not been connected to each other before, but because of the self-describing nature of the SiLA features, they can effectively discover each other, and start to interact.’ Based on HTTP/2, SiLA 2 concentrates on functionality and device behaviour, rather than device type, the SiLA organisation claims. ‘SiLA 2 essentially views everything in the lab as a service,’ explained BSSN Software president Burkhard Schaefer. ‘So, an instrument could be a service, or a LIMS could be a service, and using SiLA you can access and communicate with these services through the network. The first stage is a scan of the network to discover what services are present – in the same way that your Apple device can look for printers or speakers in its environment.


Managing data Developing a FAIR data infrastructure using open standards for data management and archiving, and for instrument communication may be the ultimate goal for data usability and longevity, but this doesn’t mean that existing proprietary instrument software should become obsolete, commented Schaefer suggested. ‘Data in its original format still has enormous value, and there are things you may be able to do with data generated in proprietary instrument software that you may not yet be able to do with the open data formats. There is still a valuable business case for the vendors, who have designed and enabled valuable functionality into their instrument software, and which users will have configured and set up to match their own method and workflows.’ This may create something of a dilemma


for organisations who are driving to implement open standards, but who don’t want to lose sight of familiar data. And, as Schaefer noted, ‘We are not out to fix something if it isn’t broken.’ Ideally, industries and the standards developers will ‘embrace, rather than replace,’ when it comes to adopting standard data formats and communication protocols. So, in an ideal world organisations


would be able to retain their original data side-by-side with data in standard format, in easily accessible, but also standard packages. It may seem like a tall order, but this concept of ‘container formats’ is gaining ground, and the technology to enable that goal has, in fact, been


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