2Nd ANNUAL REPORT of the CHAIRMAN of the JCRB to the CIPM and to the DIRECTORS of SIGNATORY

2Nd ANNUAL REPORT of the CHAIRMAN of the JCRB to the CIPM and to the DIRECTORS of SIGNATORY

3rd ANNUAL REPORT OF THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JCRB TO THE CIPM AND TO THE DIRECTORS OF SIGNATORY INSTITUTES OF THE MRA

– MARCH 2003

This report covers the activities of the Joint Committee of Regional Metrology Organizations and the BIPM (JCRB) for the calendar year 2002.[1]

The JCRB met twice in 2002:

  • The 8th JCRB meeting was held on 5-6 March at the CSIR, Pretoria, South Africa.
  • The 9th JCRB meeting was held on 3-4 October at the BIPM in Paris.

Copies of the Reports of the 8th and 9th JCRB meetings are provided in Appendix 1 and 2 respectively. In Appendix 3, I have provided a current list of members of the JCRB.

In February 2002, the JCRB Chairman appointed Dr Angela Samuel as JCRB Executive Secretary (on secondment from NML-CSIRO, Australia) to help coordinate the activities of the Committee.

Following the decisions taken at the 8th JCRB meeting, the JCRB section of the BIPM website ( now includes a restricted-access Section providing JCRB Meeting Documents of relevance to RMO technical experts. This is in addition to the open Section of the webpage providing publicly accessible JCRB documents and the restricted-access Working Documents Section for JCRB members providing the discussion papers for the 6th, 7th and now 8th and 9th JCRB meetings.

The interactive JCRB CMC website ( lists CMCs undergoing review and the current state of each review. As agreed at the 8th JCRB meeting, access to this website has been expanded from solely JCRB members (to update the review status of CMCs) to now also allow access by RMO Technical Committee/Working Group (TC/WG) Chairs (using RMO TC/WG-specific usernames and passwords). A “Technical Reviewer’s Logbook” can be created by the RMO TC/WG Chair for a set of CMCs, in which the TC/WG Chair can record the progress of the review. Currently, of 58 sets of CMCs listed on the website, 27 have been approved/published and seven are awaiting final approval; logbooks are being used with 17 of the 24 sets under review. The JCRB Exec Secretary (on behalf of the JCRB Chairman) coordinates the overall progress of each review according to the procedures in Document JCRB-7/1. The modifications made during 2002 have been intended to enhance the website’s purpose in providing an orderly and transparent review process.

(Note: The JCRB CMC website can be viewed, but not changed, by anyone from an NMI using the simple guest password: login name “guest”, password “guest 2001”.)

Other decisions of note from the 8th and 9th JCRB meetings are listed here:

  • RMO CMC submissions are to include the report on the intra-regional review, providing a checklist indicating which of the items in the list of criteria provided in Document JCRB-8/13(1b), Criteria for acceptance of data for Appendix C, have been addressed with any associated comments. (Note that the original list of criteria has been further clarified in the above Document, following discussions at the 8th JCRB meeting.)
  • Based on the recommendations of the Ad-Hoc JCRB Working Group on CMC uncertainties to the 8th JCRB meeting, which identified possible misunderstandings of CIPM MRA terminology when interpreted by the accreditation community, the JCRB definitions of the terms “Calibration and Measurement Capability” and “Uncertainty Determinations for CMCs” are now defined in Document JCRB-8/18.
  • Document JCRB-8/13, “Interpretation of Paragraph 11.3 of CIPM MRA concerning the end of the transition period”, was tabled at and revised based on comments received from the April 2002 meeting of NMI Directors. The end of the transition period of the MRA is defined in this Document as 31 December 2003. The document provides guidance on the status of the MRA and KCDB up to and following the end of the transition period. An additional document, developed at the 9th JCRB Meeting on the “End of Transition Period of CIPM MRA – Review of Published CMCs”(Doc JCRB-9/12) identifies the procedures to be followed by NMIs and RMOs to ensure that CMCs already published in the KCDB appropriately fulfil all criteria as required after the end of the transition period.
  • The Ad-Hoc JCRB Working Group on NMIs’ Quality Systems produced the “JCRB Guidelines for the monitoring and reporting of the operation of Quality Systems by RMOs” [revised Document JCRB-9/10(1_rev)].
  • The JCRB recommended the formation of “Consultative Committee Workings Groups on CMCs” [Terms of Reference given in Doc JCRB-9/8(4)] to facilitate the inter-regional CMC review process and to coordinate the review of existing CMCs based on the results of key and supplementary comparisons.

A total of some 14,000 individual lines of CMCs are now available to users in Appendix C of the KCDB, compared with around 12,000 by the end of 2001. Many CMCs are still missing, especially in the areas of Chemistry, Thermometry, Ionizing Radiation and Time and Frequency. During 2002, the following sets of CMCs were approved by the JCRB and published in the KCDB:

  • Amount of Substance (General Chemistry), declared via APMP, COOMET, EUROMET and SIM;
  • Mass and Related Quantities, declared via APMP (Malaysia, Japan), via SIM, via EUROMET, and via COOMET;
  • Ionizing Radiation, declared via COOMET and SADCMET and by the International Atomic Energy Agency;
  • Acoustics, Ultrasound and Vibration, declared via COOMET and via EUROMET;
  • Photometry and Radiometry, declared via SIM and via EUROMET.

By the end of 2002, Appendix C included:

  • 11717 CMCs declared in the fields of Photometry and Radiometry, Electricity and Magnetism, Length, Acoustics, Ultrasound and Vibration, and Mass and Related Quantities;
  • 2137 CMCs declared in the field of Amount of Substance; and
  • 84 CMCs declared in the field of Ionizing Radiation.

No CMCs in Thermometry and Time and Frequency have so far been approved by the JCRB.

The design of Appendix C of the KCDB evolved significantly over 2002:

  • The Appendix C Chemistry section was extended to cover all categories, and a filter was applied to the Chemical category in the search engine.
  • The Appendix C Ionizing Radiation section was created, using a new search engine based on the selection of a “Quantity”, a “Source” and a “Medium”.
  • A facility for publishing tables of uncertainty was created. A large number of CMCs corresponding to the same measurand, which can take a number of different values, and to the same parameter, which can also take a number of different values, can be concatenated into one single CMC. The relevant uncertainty is then described with a table giving the complete set of uncertainty values. This facility was requested in December 2001 by the Electricity community.

As part of the publicity for the BIPM Key Comparison Database, the updated version of the KCDB leaflet was widely distributed over the year. The BIPM shared the NIST stand at the PITTCON Conference in New Orleans in March 2002 to publicise the database and MRA among the chemistry community. The KCDB was also demonstrated live to an audience of European regulators and trade representatives at a Workshop held at the IRMM in Belgium in May 2002 and later at a joint BIPM-NPL Workshop in the UK in September 2002.

To help promote the benefits of participation in the Metre Convention and the CIPM MRA particularly for small and developing countries, I provided an article for the October 2002 issue of INFOSIM (the SIM Newsletter). This article has subsequently been re-drafted to become the “Letter to NMI Directors of States not yet Members of the Metre Convention or Associates of the CGPM”, for distribution in January 2003 both to the identified NMI Directors and to the Embassies of relevant States in Paris.

The operation of the MRA continues to foster close collaboration between NMIs around the world, through memberships in Consultative Committees, CC Working Groups, RMO Technical Committees and Working Groups and the JCRB itself, as well as with staff of the BIPM. The credibility and effectiveness of the CIPM MRA are wholly dependent on the substantial work of these various parties, to whom I pay tribute.

The JCRB continues its schedule of two meetings in 2003, the first in March in Tsukuba at the invitation of APMP, and the second in October at the BIPM. The end of the transition period at the end of 2003 will no doubt lead to further evolution in the operation of the JCRB.

The degree of cooperation between RMO representatives to the JCRB continues to provide a strong foundation for the work of the JCRB, and I express my appreciation for their on-going enthusiasm and active participation.

T J Quinn

Chairman, JCRB.

28 March 2003.

[1] The 1st Report “of the Chairman of the JCRB to the CIPM and to the Directors of Signatory Institutes of the MRA” was produced in December 2000, and the 2nd Report in February 2002.