Overview of INCA-QM-BASIC

The add-on INCA-QM-BASIC (Quality Management Basic) supports the management of quality meta data and process meta data for calibration tasks. For exchanging data that include quality meta information, the data exchange formats PaCo and CDF V2.0 are used; process meta data can only be exchanged using the CDF V2.0 format.

PaCo (Parameter Content Files) is an XML data exchange format based on the MSR standard (MSR 2.2). CDF V2.0 is an advanced development of PaCo.

Similarly to a DCM or CSV file, a PaCo or CDF V2.0 file stores the name, physical value, and unit of the variables. But it also contains comments and quality meta data for every variable.

Using this information, a status history of the variables can be generated that supports later validation and tracing of the application progress. This history can contribute to company-internal quality assurance of the application activities.

The calibration history chronologically records all relevant information occurring during the application run. This information can be passed on at the transition from one program/data state to another or exchanged between users of the application working on the project concerned. Furthermore, an archiving of the information in superordinate data storage systems has to be supported. For this purpose, the following basic functionalities are provided:

• Creation and modification of calibration history entries for variables and functions
• Configurable copying of calibration history entries during the copying of datasets
• Import and export of calibration history entries
• Tracing of application status at variable and function level
• Process meta data at variable and function level

You can configure the calibration history entries of the variables and functions in the database manager and view and edit them in the experiment environment and in the calibration data manager. In the calibration data manager, you can also use the PaCo and CDF V2.0 files as source or destination datasets for the list, copy and compare actions and display and issue the listed contents of the datasets in PaCo or CDF V2.0 format.