Bridging the language divide

Tablets and smartphones have revolutionised the way in which we all work, and changed expectations of how everyone should be able to work. Modern workers need to communicate and share information, from any location, and from any mobile platform. Making potentially sensitive analytical and other scientific data available to the right personnel, in real time and in a suitable format, is no different, conceptually, at least. Yet in an R&D or life-science testing environment, data is likely to comprise multiple layers of information, coming out of multiple instruments from multiple vendors, which may all use different native software.

Interpreting data formats

BSSN Software recently launched its Seahorse Mobile Edition platform as a vendor-independent solution for delivering scientific data to mobile devices, supporting a wide range of analytical data types, from HPLC and mass spectrometry, to medical imaging, microplate readers and bioreactors. The platform effectively sits alongside the data source – for example, a scientific data management system (SDMS), which provides an interface with existing data repositories, and interprets the data format. ‘In today’s world of mobile working, it is really important for people to be able to access their analytical data wherever they are, perhaps to see what analytical results have been generated overnight, while they are on the train to work in the morning’, commented Burkhard Schaefer, BSSN president and lead architect of the AnIML data standard on which BSSN’s Seahorse family of software is built. ‘Users may want to flick through data from previous experiments to help decide on their next round of analyses, and they may not necessarily be in the laboratory or at a workstation when they need to be able to do this.’

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