n Editorial vii

Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems, 19 (1993) vii Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Amsterdam

m Editorial

STANDARDS/REFERENCE DATA SETS NEW EDITOR

When analytical chemists develop a new method they first work on pure standards. Then they determine interferences, by adding possible interferences to the standards and observing the effect. The next step is to validate the new method. Whenever possible, this is done by ana- lyzing standard reference materials. NIST, BCR, and several other institutions make such materi- als available to the scientific community for that purpose.

Chemometrics is expanding rapidly and our journal is expanding with it. The need was felt to include an additional Editor and it is our ,plea- sure to announce that Olav Kvalheim has ac- cepted this position.

Chemometricians often work in a similar man- ner. They develop their methods first on simu- lated and well-behaved data. When this leads to good results they add interferences, such as dif- ferent types of noise, outliers, etc. Then they apply (or should apply) their method to real data. However, contrary to their analytical colleagues, they cannot validate their methods by using stan- dard or reference data sets. It is to be hoped that one day NIST, BCR, etc. will develop such data sets. In the meantime, this journal has decided to provide some such data sets to the scientific community. In the article on page 35 the first are proposed. We have chosen data sets that were prepared for that purpose (the Quail Roost data) or have become de facto standards (Forina’s olive oil data) because they have been used so often.

We hope to provide additional data sets later. As explained in the article, such data should have the approval of experts in the field and we will do a thorough review, which will not be restricted to chemometricians, but, it is hoped, will include specialists in the application fields. This also means that the procedure may be lengthy, so that it probably will take some time before additional reference data sets can be proposed.

The Scandinavian countries have been very important to the development of chemometrics and his appointment is also a way to honour the many Nordic chemometricians that have con- tributed so much to our science. Professor Kval- heim leads the chemometrics research at the Uni- versity of Bergen in Norway and is also a research and educational consultant to the Norsk Hydro Research Center in Porsgrunn. He started in chemometrics with applications of SIMCA to pol- lution monitoring with blue mussels. His many contributions to the development of latent-varia- ble-based methods since then are so well known that they do not require further presentation. His current interests are listed by him as: FT-IR spectroscopy/latent-variable analysis with appli- cation to resolution problems, process analysis, spectrum-property modelling and kinetic mod- elling of petroleum generation and implementa- tion of chemometric algorithms using graphic in- terfaces. On behalf of the Editors and myself, I welcome Professor Kvalheim to our team.

D.L. MASSART