Matrix catalogue (a coding catalogue for the transmission of data from official food and veterinary surveillance and monitoring)

The competent authorities of official food and veterinary surveillance take samples from the test material (e.g. food). The results of the sampling are forwarded as a dataset by the local authorities to the state authorities and from there to the BVL. In the BVL a review is carried out for the EU Commission and the Federal Government. The results of the sampling are transmitted in a defined reporting format. For individual fields in the reporting format, encodings from coding catalogs are used. This data set contains the encodings for investigational goods (matrix), such as food, wine, tobacco, human tissues and animal products. The encodings in the matrix catalogue are a simple list of assignments from an encoding to a textual description. A conversion of this list catalogue to a new catalogue structure is currently in consultation between the Federal Government and the Länder: the new matrix catalogue is hierarchical and has descriptive features (facing) that make the catalogue easily expandable and more flexible. The currently used catalogues are, like the designs of new catalogues, published at https://katalogportal.bvl.bund.de/. There it is also possible to navigate through the web application “through the catalog” and create a coding.