To assist broad dissemination of the draft guidance during development, the principles of the guide were presented at the April 2002 BIPM workshop on traceability in chemical measurement. The paper forming the body of the present report is the submitted proceedings paper following from that presentation.

The paper presents the basic principles of the guidance document, and discusses some of the implications. In this paradigm, traceability is seen as arising from the values of quantities used to calculate a measurement result and control the measurement conditions. Traceability is established when all these quantities are under sufficient control. The role of Validation is (among other things) to confirm that all necessary influences on the measurement have been taken into account.

The implications of this view are discussed, with particular reference to the role of CRMs in providing traceable measurements.

The voting draft of the complete guidance is available at

http://www.eurachem.ul.pt/guides/Traceability_Mar03_voting.pdf