Atelier du CCQM "support and review of CMCs"

Background

There are currently 6540 CMCs published in the KCDB for Chemical and Biological measurement within the remit of the activities of the CCQM. Whilst it is the responsibility of each NMI to keep their CMCs up to date, the CCQM via its KCWG has been running an annual re-review of CMCs, prioritizing the CMC categories to be re-reviewed each year based on number of CMCs published before a certain year. Up to this year (2025), the number of CMCs published before 2010 was used as the metric for selecting the categories of CMCs for re-review. This has now been completed, and CMCs published in 2015 or earlier would be the new metric, if the same strategy is followed, which would result in nearly 1500 CMCs to be re-reviewed over the next five years.

This is an ideal time to re-evaluate the strategy of CMC re-review, and this topic will be the focus of this workshop. There are also additional changes that have occurred over the last years that are expected to have an impact on CMCs and the review process:

• Increased focus on digitalization, machine readability, FAIR data, unique identifiers and their impact on CMCs including broad claim CMCs.
• The rapid development of AI and LLM systems and their potential use in CMC review.
• Well established strategies for repeat comparisons in CCQM WGs with older comparisons now starting to be archived so that they can no longer be used for CMC support.
• The expansion of CCQM WGs to cover new measurement fields, notably for biological measurands, which are not well described by the current listed CMC Service Categories for Chemical and Biological measurements.
• Two uncertainty conventions are used to explain how uncertainty varies over a range of values – this causes confusion to both users and reviewers.
• Discussion of use of evidence other than comparisons has been ongoing – but rarely ever implemented and/or accepted.

Goals of the Workshop

The workshop goals are:

• To provide an overview of the status of the 6540 CMCs in terms of:
  • Their distribution over service categories and CCQM WG expertise;
  • The dates of their last review;
  • The percentage underpinned by CCQM Key comparisons;
  • A re-review plan based on the approach used up to now by the CCQM.
• To describe the mapping of CCQM Key comparisons against CMCs for the 3 largest CCQM WGs (GAWG, IAWG, OAWG), and thereby for each WG area:
  • Understand the number of CMCs underpinned by each Key comparison and how long ago the comparison results were published;
  • Understand the feasibility of implementing a ‘repeat comparison- archiving of old comparison’-strategy as a way to initiate re-review of CMCs;
  • Understand the need for underpinning CMCs with evidence other than Key Comparisons.
• To develop recommendations on a future strategy for CMC review in the CCQM measurement space.
• To provide examples where information other than KCs could underpin CMCs and provide recommendations on what that information would need to be and how it would be reviewed in the CMC approval process.
• To understand the current uses of CMC measurement services categories and develop recommendations for the evolution of these to best meet the needs of human and machine use.
• To examine the support that AI could provide in CMC review and to develop recommendations for modifications to the KCDB that would be required to benefit from this.

Participation

Participation is open to representatives of NMIs and DIs active in CCQM and its WGs and related technical committees in the RMOs.