Future directions for data compilations

As the world's supply of thermophysical property data that emerges from the laboratory increases, users of data become more dependent on evaluated com pilations. However, the cost of producing and maintaining such compilations by traditional methods is becoming prohibitively expensive, The traditiona l compiler searches: the literature, extracts, evaluates, and analyzes pert inent data and gathers it into a document or electronic database that refle cts the stale of knowledge of a particular subject at a particular time. Be cause clef the inherent time lag, it never catches up to the current state. The attempt to catch up requires that the whole procedure be repeated at i ntervals. with greater cost for each cycle. A more cost-effective procedure , called dynamic compilation is described. Here the user produces a compila tion to-order at the time of need. It uses a suitable archive of experiment al data maintained up-to-date, an automated procedure for extracting and se lecting the best pertinent data, and procedures For fitting the pieces to s uitable models that furnishes parameters for internally consistent data set s. With proper design of components this procedure is more economical than and superior to the traditional static compilations.