It is often coupled to chromatographic techniques such as gas- or liquid chromatography and has found widespread adoption in the fields of analytical chemistry and biochemistry where it can be used to identify and characterize small molecules and proteins (proteomics).
[4] ANDI is based on netCDF which is a software tool library for writing and reading data files.
[5] AnIML is a joined effort of IUPAC and ASTM International to create an XML based standard that covers a wide variety of analytical techniques including mass spectrometry.
[8] mzXML is a XML (eXtensible Markup Language) based common file format for proteomics mass spectrometric data.
[13] This format was officially released at the 2008 American Society for Mass Spectrometry Meeting, and is since then relatively stable with very few updates.
Instead of defining new file formats and writing converters for proprietary vendor formats a group of scientists proposed to define a common application program interface to shift the burden of standards compliance to the instrument manufacturers' existing data access libraries.
It uses the mzML ontology, but saves the data using the HDF5 backend for reduced storage space requirements and improved read/write speed.
It leverages HDF5 and aims to achieve file sizes similar to those from the proprietary and closed vendor formats.
Both are based on the Allotrope Foundation Ontologies (AFO) and contain schemas for mass spectrometry and chromatography coupled with MS detectors.
(**) Micromass was acquired by Waters in 1997 (***) Finnigan is a division of Thermo There are several viewers for mzXML, mzML and mzData.