VAMAS file format

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Mon, 10/24/2016 - 10:52 am

Does anyone know about "VAMAS Surface Chemical Analysis Standard Data Transfer Format"? It appears to be identified by the .vms extension. Is it a common format? Has anyone written an Igor loader for it?
I don't think it is a too common format (documentation etc. is rather sparse), but I encountered it when working with a commercial XPS apparatus (JEOL Ltd.). I guess it is mostly found with commercial analytical apparatuses.
Anyway, I wrote a parser which goes through all relevant lines of a file using FReadLine (but in the end only extracts the information I was interested in at that time). I cannot claim that it will work for everything, but maybe this can serve as a starting point. I also attach four generic example files I found somewhere. Hope that helps.
VAMAS parser.ipf VAMAS files.zip

October 24, 2016 at 07:11 pm - Permalink

VAMAS is common as an exchange format defined for surface science data, mostly XPS. It's defined in a publication [1] and a slightly modified ISO standard [2]. See also [3].

Many commercial XPS fit programs like CasaXPS [4] or UniFit[5] can read it.

I've written a VAMAS writer in C++ (which I'm afraid I can not share) but no VAMAS reader. The VAMAS format itself has the notion of blocks, so you could use a LoadWave command from time to time to avoid the slow FReadLine for data itself.

The format itself is quite vast looking at the spec but it's mostly used for 1D data with one or two experiment variables.

[1]: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sia.740130202/full
[2]: http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=24269
[3]: http://www.npl.co.uk/science-technology/surface-and-nanoanalysis/servic…
[4]: http://www.casaxps.com/
[5]: http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~unifit/

October 25, 2016 at 03:23 am - Permalink

Thanks, guys!

I ran across VAMAS format while looking for data to use in testing a built-in Voigt fit function. The data was from CasaXPS. For myself the need is very low priority, but having run across the format I thought I'd see what it was all about.

John Weeks
WaveMetrics, Inc.
support@wavemetrics.com

October 25, 2016 at 09:21 am - Permalink

Wow! There are a lot of other useful file loaders there too one level up.

Thanks.

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J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAH

November 22, 2016 at 06:15 pm - Permalink