e protocol services module (PSM) provides the information necessary to conduct an experiment, including the hardware description needed to operate optical detectors (sample holder angles and radii) and the method used (e.g. rotor speed, temperature, temperature tolerance, acceleration, braking, duration at each speed, any delay after reaching speed prior to data acquisition, time between data acquisition events and duration of the experiment) to collect the data. The identities of the protocol developer and user are kept with this information and saved in a database. A draft standard database structure is available (Langhorst 2008) and is described in “Proposed data analysis and data management infrastructure”.
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