Add support for interchange of spectral data (e.g. milk testing spectra)

[cookeac]

Proposed at the ICAR Annual Conference in June 2026.

[cookeac]

Robert Fourdraine sourced a FOSS Milkoscan export from FOSS and will contact Bentley for examples, and Jasper van der Noord is contacting Delta.

I have reviewed publications from the ICAR/IDF ExtraMIR project and the Open Soil Spectroscopy Library (OSSL).

In the absence of a standard, most organisations have created R or Python code to consume spectrum export files from relevant laboratories or machines, and standardise these into a database. The relevant information consumed seems to include:

1. Sample information - in the case of livestock data this includes: the herd or farm (location), the animal identifier (animal), a sample date, and a sample identifier. Possibly contact information.
2. Laboratory and equipment information including: laboratory name (responsible?), analysis date/time (eventDateTime?), device model and version, optics (if not specified by device model), laboratory preparation method, analysis temperature. Potentially also licence URL.
3. Spectral metadata - specifically the starting wave number, ending wave number or count of wave numbers, width or spacing, and spectrum type (absorption or reflectance).
4. The ordered array of absorption or reflectance values (one for each wave number from start to end). In the example file from FOSS, I believe we have an array with { waveNumber, reflectance (always 0 in our sample), absorption }

References:

1. https://www.icar.org/extramir/
2. Rapid selection of milk mid-infrared spectra for creating a dairy cow population world representative spectral database, https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(24)01020-8/fulltext
3. Soil Spectrum data Python package: https://github.com/franckalbinet/soilspecdata
4. Open Soil Spectral Library web services documentation and Neospectra database documentation: https://docs.soilspectroscopy.org/web-services.html
5. Open Soil Spectroscopy API Swagger (no spectra though): https://api.soilspectroscopy.org/__docs__/#/default/get_models
6. OSSL database imports documentation: https://github.com/soilspectroscopy/ossl-imports