- Jul 2, 2018 - Last year, Elsevier, donated its Unified Data Model (UDM) to The Pistoia Alliance. Since the donation, The Pistoia Alliance has been working with the project group - which includes members from BIOVIA, Elsevier, GSK, Novartis and Roche - to develop the model further, with the aim of publishing an open and freely available format for the storage and exchange of drug discovery data. The ultimate goal of the project is for the UDM to become the accepted  vendor-agnostic experimental reaction/data format standard.

The Pistoia Alliance has today announced the release of an updated data model which consists of definitions of the UDM file format, several sample datasets, sample source code in Python and Java and example data sets. The current release is compatible with the original version created by Elsevier, but removes previous uncertainty regarding the units of measurement used for individual numerical values and documents fundamental entities. The Pistoia Alliance hopes the update will facilitate the exchange of information about chemical reactions, and show the industry how it can work with UDM files. Going forward, the team is looking to introduce several enhancements which will increase representation of experiments captured in electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs).