<P> The Archival Cytometry Standard (ACS) is being developed to bundle data with different components describing cytometry experiments . It captures relations among data, metadata, analysis files and other components, and includes support for audit trails, versioning and digital signatures . The ACS container is based on the ZIP file format with an XML - based table of contents specifying relations among files in the container . The XML Signature W3C Recommendation has been adopted to allow for digital signatures of components within the ACS container . An initial draft of ACS has been designed in 2007 and finalized in 2010 . Since then, ACS support has been introduced in several software tools including FlowJo and Cytobank . </P> <P> The lack of gating interoperability has traditionally been a bottleneck preventing reproducibility of flow cytometry data analysis and the usage of multiple analytical tools . To address this shortcoming, ISAC developed Gating - ML, an XML - based mechanism to formally describe gates and related data (scale) transformations . The draft recommendation version of Gating - ML was approved by ISAC in 2008 and it is partially supported by tools like FlowJo, the flowUtils library in R / BioConductor, and FlowRepository . It supports rectangular gates, polygon gates, convex polytopes, ellipsoids, decision trees and Boolean collections of any of the other types of gates . In addition, it includes dozens of built in public transformations that have been shown to potentially useful for display or analysis of cytometry data . In 2013, Gating - ML version 2.0 was approved by ISAC's Data Standards Task Force as a Recommendation . This new version offers slightly less flexibility in terms of the power of gating description; however, it is also significantly easier to implement in software tools . </P> <P> The Classification Results (CLR) File Format has been developed to exchange the results of manual gating and algorithmic classification approaches in a standard way in order to be able to report and process the classification . CLR is based in the commonly supported CSV file format with columns corresponding to different classes and cell values containing the probability of an event being a member of a particular class . These are captured as values between 0 and 1 . Simplicity of the format and its compatibility with common spreadsheet tools have been the major requirements driving the design of the specification . Although it was originally designed for the field of flow cytometry, it is applicable in any domain that needs to capture either fuzzy or unambiguous classifications of virtually any kinds of objects . </P> <P> As in other bioinformatics fields, development of new methods has primarily taken the form of free open source software, and several databases have been created for depositing open data . </P>

Force field analysis is strictly a quantitative technique for analyzing data