The mission of the PSI was, and still is, to bring together tool developers from academia, software vendors, and hardware vendors to create, maintain, and promote data standards that will be used throughout the proteomics and computational mass spectrometry community. These products include standardized data formats, minimum information guidelines, and controlled vocabularies used to drive the formats. Standard formats are only effective if they are widely implemented in software tools, and thus the PSI also includes extensive outreach efforts and works with software developers to implement its standards. As a result, adoption and wide-spread implementation of PSI standards has enabled the development of software, such as Cytoscape, and APIs, such as PSICQUIC and ProXI, which enable easy access to rich data streams by a broad spectrum of the research community.