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3.2.5 On-line Monitoring of SRM's
Alan Heckert
Carroll Croarkin Statistical Engineering Division, ITL
Tom Gills Standard Reference Materials Program, TS The Statistical Engineering Division is involved in the certification of a large number of Standard Reference Materials (SRM's). The certification of an SRM is a collaboration between one of the technical laboratories, the Office of Measurement Services, and the Statsitical Engineering Division. At the request of Tom Gills, Standard Reference Materials Program division chief, we investigated a method to provide on-line monitoring of the current status of all SRM's that SED is involved with. Previously, the status of the SRM's was maintained in a PC database with periodic hardcopy reports generated for the Office of Measurement Services. Our primary goals in designing the on-line system were to have a system that all interested parties (the technical lab, the SRM office, and SED) could easily access, that would be easy to update, and that would be relatively low maintenance. To achieve those goals, we created a web site accessible from the internal NIST web server (URL: http://www.i-nist.gov/itl/div898/index.html). The main home page provides 2 primary tables. The first provides access to SRM's via their number. This division is arbitrary and is provided simply to make the subsequent pages a more managable size. The second table provides access to the SRM's via the NIST laboratory. If the user clicks on the "Chemical Sciences and Technology" button, a summary table for all the SRM's in CSTL is generated. For convenience, this table is divided into the various CSTL divisions. Completed SRM's are listed separately from the currently active SRM's. The summary line lists the ID, name, contacts, and a status number. A similar scheme is followed for the other NIST labs and for the numerically ordered SRM's. The user can click on any individual SRM to get a more detailed summary. The information for a given SRM can be updated from this more detailed page. Specifically, the current status can be modified and comment entries can be added. This updating is typically performed by the SED staff, but comment entries can be entered by any of the interested parties. New SRM's can be added from a form accessible from the home page. This updating is accomplished with Perl based CGI scripts. Since this is a web based system, it easily accessible to any NIST staff member with a web browser. It is straightforward for SED staff to update the current status of their SRM's and to add new SRM's. Once the initial pages were created and the CGI scripts were written, minimal maintenance is involved.
Figure 8: A sample page from the SRM web page.
Date created: 7/20/2001 |