Content area
Full Text
The best interface is the one you never see
Someone once told me that you could tell how good an ice cream was by reading the list of ingredients. The fewer the number of ingredients, the better the ice cream. That same philosophy could be applied to CDS/LIMS interfacing - the fewer components that you need to deal with, the better the interface. "Embedded integration," placing the laboratory information management system (LIMS) interface right into the chromatography data system (CDS) application, follows that philosophy by allowing the analyst to interact directly with the LIMS from inside the CDS.
Until recently, creating an interface between a CDS and a LIMS meant implementing a clearly distinct and separate interface program to connect the two systems. Using API technologies, third party vendors can now develop advanced interfaces between the CDS and the LIMS, which can be integrated easily with existing CDS installations. New menu items can be added to the CDS that let the analyst view samples in LIMS, select samples for analysis, create CDS sequence lists and report results back to LIMS. For the analyst, this means that they...