HMSA Hyper-spectral data format

[Mike Matthews]

ISO 5820 has just been published as a new standard, detailing a platform-independent format for storing and archiving hyper-spectral datasets. This could be as simple as an electron image or as complicated as a full x-ray spectral map + EBSD + CL + … The format was developed by an international team led by Nestor Zaluzec at Argonne National Labs and is based on tagged data in a plain text file detailing what data is stored in a binary file and how it is formatted. Hopefully it’ll find traction and allow us to store our hard-earned data without fear that we’ll lose access to it when we change our instrument.

[sem-geologist]

Is this ISO royalty-free? If We would want to implement the reader/writer to that format in open source software (i.e. HyperSpy) is it legal to use such ISO, as basically the standard is then exposed in the source code which then is widely publicly available.

[JonF]

Is this ISO royalty-free? If We would want to implement the reader/writer to that format in open source software (i.e. HyperSpy) is it legal to use such ISO, as basically the standard is then exposed in the source code which then is widely publicly available.

A good question!
It would be difficult to convince the world to start using the .hmsa format if there were usage restrictions placed upon it. 

The MSA have uploaded all the draft documents and these are freely available:
https://microscopy.org/Scientific-Data/Standards
Original proposal: https://microscopy.org/files/galleries/MM2011-HMSAFormat.pdf
Draft specification: https://microscopy.org/files/galleries/HMSA_Specification_20231001_ISO_DIS_5820_Draft.pdf
Presentation: https://microscopy.org/files/galleries/HMSAFileFormat-Presentation_2012_small.pdf


It does appear that it is intended to be freely available to use but whilst it says: "The structure of the binary file format is simple, unambiguous, and precisely defined in a human readable format within the XML file", it doesn't seem to explicitly state anywhere that it is royalty free.

[Mike Matthews]

You have to pay to get a hard or pdf copy of the standard (same as for any ISO standard). You are then free to write whatever importer/exporter software you want. There are no royalty fees, the same as is true for the existing and long implemented EMAS spectral file format.