A UK-based ground truth data set of GCMS analysed ignitable liquid samples - a template for making chromatographic data accessible as an open source data set.

Fire debris is often recovered as part of a fire scene in-vestigation to determine whether an ignitable liquid might be present which may be evidence of a deliberate fire. The analysis of fire debris produces chromatograms that a foren-sic chemist uses to determine whether or not an ignitable liquid may be present. Currently there are very few pub-licly available data sets that can be used for training and statistical modelling in this area. The data set in this pa-per has been prepared with these two applications in mind and covers a wide range of ignitable liquids available in the UK. We created a data set of 35 ignitable liquids including petrol (gasoline), light, medium and heavy petroleum dis-tillates (i.e diesel) from several retailers. Each ignitable liq-uid was systematically evaporated to produce six additional samples. Each sample was repetitively analysed to provide an overall data set of 751 analytical outputs (including chro-matograms). Each data sample is expressed in multiple for-mats and the metadata containing any data used in the pro-duction of the samples is included. The folder and file names are designed to avoid misplacements and to manipulate fold-ers and files systematically using computer code.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc.This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Automated summary

Fire debris analysis is used to determine the presence of ignitable liquids and evidence of deliberate fires. Limited publicly available datasets are currently available for this type of analysis. This paper presents a dataset of various ignitable liquids in the UK, along with extensive analytical outputs and metadata.