Adobe PDF use in analytical information storage and archiving

Columns

01 Oct 2007

A.N. Davies
External Professor, University of Glamorgan, UK, Director, ALIS Ltd and ALIS GmbH—Analytical Laboratory Informatics Solutions

Background

There are more things in Heaven and Earth Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Yes, the children are now studying Hamlet at school and this seemed an appropriate quote to start of this edition.

When we set up ALIS GmbH one of the first major “discoveries” was probably the most embarrassing for me. Having worked on analytical data standards for so long, I seem to have successfully generated a blind spot for the developments which have taken place in the structure, standardisation and functionality of the Portable Document Format (PDF). Maybe it’s due to a subconscious aversion to what I had for a long time seen as a simplistic “get out” solution for those too lazy to convert data into a long-term, stable, vendor-neutral format. How often have we heard the “well... we just print to PDF” as an excuse for not having in place a properly thought through analytical data storage and archiving policy taking no account of the future use to which that data may well be put within an organisation.

Anyway, it has been pretty difficult for me to admit that my knowledge of the available functionality lay somewhere back in the early 1990s but I hope in this column to make some amends!

We will look at the PDF file format and standardisation by international standards bodies. On the functional side we will look at:

How the PDF document can work in the Analytical Laboratory environment not only as a stable document format but also communicating with other computer systems such as a LIMS or ERP software suite such as SAP, essentially making the PDF form into a database data entry and reporting tool.
Integrating spectroscopic and other analytical data into a PDF document.
The use of so-called rights enabled PDF documents within the free Adobe Reader software package providing additional functionality such as editing and saving content.
In addition I will briefly outline how a PDF document can work in an analytical laboratory environment pulling and pushing data like a database front-end system.
To finish off I will very briefly touch on document security and digital signatures.