Rapid advances in computer simulations, together with the quest for developing a digital data space for data mining through national and international networks, have fueled the need for the standardization of adsorption data beyond the current IUPAC recommendations. The variety and relative inflexibility of existing adsorption data formats and conventional graphical reporting inhibits the effective use of reported data. The largest adsorption database, NIST/ARPA-E Adsorption Database, contains thousands of isotherms that have been laboriously digitized from journal articles. In particular, an understanding of the comparison between experimental and computational data is difficult due to poor experimental documentation. A general, flexible, rapidly extensible and universal file format protocol following the guidelines presented by Wilkinson et al. will boost the development of porous materials and reveal their application potential. Moreover, it enables to validate and advance theoretical methods as a wider and more precise database is openly accessible to validate, for example force field parameters, interactions potentials, isotherm models and more. As with other standard formats, such a format must be machine-independent and portable so that accessibility to data items is independent of their point of origin. It must also allow new data items to be incorporated without the need to modify existing files to enable an evolving format.