At the risk of putting everyone to an early sleep after a weekend respite... I am going to bring up this topic one more time! This time, however, I have done more than send in comments or complaints: I have tried to do something useful and propose a simplified data standard which is only a slight modification of the FCS3.0 standard. First off, I believe that the FCS data standard has done an outstanding job of allowing (1) the exchange of primary data; and (2) the generation of some excellent third-party software to analyze flow cytometry data. Both of these are beneficial to our community at large! These goals must be kept in mind in the evolution of the standard. Therefore, I strongly support that continued use of FCS as a data standard for flow cytometry. I think many of the modifications in FCS3.0 are good, and hope that the manufacturers who write acquisition software will adopt FCS3.0 as soon as it has been "ratified" (or whatever process is required for official ISAC blessing). The principle problem with FCS, from my standpoint, is that the specification of data types is far too broad. This is a potential problem, because no one has written a generally-distributed software that will read in all the different formats allowed! Why? Because no one uses a vast majority of these formats? Why should I incorporate the ability to read IEEE floating point numbers for parameter values in my software when this feature would be used by perhaps one laboratory in the world? The cost-benefit ratio does not make such coding viable. It is readily apparent that a vast majority of FCS files generated at this time use a single format of the data. Therefore, I have proposed a "simplified" FCS standard (copies of this proposal have been sent to G. Valet and D. Coder for distribution on the appropriate web sites; I will send it by EMail to anyone who requests it as well). "FCS3.0S" is designed to keep the vast majority of extant data files compliant, and yet assure that future software development efforts will yield applications that can read all possible compliant files. The draft of this proposal is just that: a draft. I didn't spend all that much time on it, because I don't know how receptive the FCS committee will be (or the community at large). If there IS interest, please send comments and criticisms to me (or to the discussion sites). mr
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