Establishing digital reference material documentation infrastructure for chemical metrology

Abstract There is a significant interest by reference material producers to issue digital reference material documentation. To achieve this, a structured digital representation of the relevant data must be created and made available on the World Wide Web. The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has accomplished this by creating unique digital identifiers and using the NRC Digital Repository which has enabled machine-readable integration with other databases. We discuss our efforts and provide applications showcasing the added value of open-access FAIR data for chemical metrology. In particular, we present two proof-of-concept applications, web and mobile versions of a Reference Material Explorer software that demonstrate how digital reference material documentation enables data retrieval, dynamic searching, visualization, and integration with external databases such as PubChem.