Development of digital calibration certificates

Project Description

The goal of this project is to foster the development of harmonised digital calibration certificates (DCC) at national metrology institutes and calibration laboratories. The focus is on DCCs with machine interpretable information about the calibration in such a way that it can be utilised for digital workflows in measurement science, calibration, conformity assessment and industry.

Therefore, the project will carry out the following actions:

  • Definition of minimum requirements for DCC regarding content and interfaces
  • Development and publication of case studies, guidelines and software
  • Organisation of workshops to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of novel approaches
  • Organisation of training courses, both, web-based and in person
  • Active collaboration with all EURAMET TCs
  • Active collaboration with the CIPM and its CCs
     

Next concrete steps are:

  • Definition of a “Calibration Certificate Cover”- describing mandatory information for DCCs. By this all users may be enabled to develop their own national implementations, based on common and shared “Digital Calibration Certificate” characteristics.
  • Development of interfaces between different approaches/implementations and a harmonisation on European level. Support for smaller NMIs
  • Regular meetings (06/2019, 01/2020, …) to present and discuss different approaches.


Initial developments towards a DCC are undertaken also in the EMPIR project 17IND02 SmartCom, starting June 2018.


Progress Report 2024-03-06

In order to achieve the specific objectives, several work packages (WP) have been agreed:

1. Structure and harmonisation
2. Software tools
3. Impact and dissemination

All three WP are still in progress.
In WP1, dedicated examples were collected and analysed regarding similarities in structure in various measurement domains and the resulting need for harmonisation with the focus on interoperability and machine interpretable content. Alternative approaches for establishing DCCs have been investigated, resulting in solutions published via Github repository.

WP2 has conducted a state-of-the-art overview of existing tools and software. It has also identified needs and requirements regarding middleware for both generating and processing DCCs.

WP3 has been closely related to the work conducted in the SCP project DCC2GO, resulting in a comprehensive DCC Training Compendium and a DCC Starter Kit to enable both NMIs, laboratories and end users an easier access to the DCC topic.

CEM (Spain), GUM (Poland), TUBITAK (Turkye), Justervesenet (Norway), NMIJ (Japan) and NPLI (India) are now participating in this project.

The coordination of the project has been taken over by Shana Schönhals (PTB)  from Anke Keidel (PTB).