Summary
The Flow Cytometry Standard (FCS) specification has been adopted for the common representation of flow cytometry data, and this standard is supported by all analytical instrument and third party software suppliers. It includes data, metadata and analysis components within the same file. However, metadata and analysis components, if included at all, are not recorded in a standardized fashion or in sufficient detail for use by independent parties.
We are proposing to address these shortcomings via series of related data standard proposals. Different components describing analytical cytometry experiments would be stored reusing standard formats such as XML, RDF, and others, and all the components would be bundled together into an Analytical Cytometry Standard (ACS) container.
We suggest using ZIP as the file format for the analytical cytometry standard container. This approach has been adopted by other groups including for purposes such as Java JAR files, Office Open XML format, and many others.
ACS proposals download
The proposal for using ZIP as the file format can be downloaded from here.
Please download the complete proposals at https://sourceforge.net/projects/flowcyt (including proposals for ACS components).
| Last update: January 22nd, 2008 |