An exiting phase of development is now ready for general comments and testing. In june/july of this year the first cross platform experiments were available published on the testing page http://www.epidata.dk/testing.php

Crossplatform function must solve aspects such as: - many different local character sets - different standards for physical file formats - the user should not do anything special when sending or receiving files created on another operating system

On top of this another issue is coming up soon - the development of a dedicated data entry module also allowing for GCP (Good Clinical Practice) rules of transaction logging.

Therefore we have now experimented with development and specification of a file format which contains as well the data as the metadata needed for understanding the data. By doing so we are moving towards a new structure: a. Datafile containing datadefinition and data. (parts of current rec and chk file). Suggested extension: recxml b. Dataentry definition file containing control during entry (e.g. relate, range, mustenter etc). Suggested extension: chkxml - part b not developed yet

The proposed new data format is described here: http://www.epidata.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/documentation:datafileformat_xml

Just now users are encouraged to test the following: 1. Can the test application read your files ? 2. Can the test application write your files ? 3. In particular test - when possible - whether the data files can be read on another operating system. E.g. saved by a Linux or Mac and then read on a windows pc.

Get the test application from: http://www.epidata.dk/testing.php And report to the epidata-list of failures and success.

Data formats supported are: REC, RECXML, ODF, DBF, XLS A table of what can be imported and exported is shown here: http://www.epidata.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/documentation:importexport

Operating systems supported are: Mac (OS X), Linux (32+64bit), Windows. Mac PowerPC expected soon.

After a few weeks of comments on the format a new test application will be created. Which will collect some time estimates of reading and writing data with subsequent reporting to a central database. This method should allow for future user tests of core modules with documentation available on the central website.

Regards Jens Lauritsen EpiData Association