The Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) with associated Energy Dispersive Spectrometer (EDS) is commonly used to characterize the structure and elemental composition of a wide variety of materials of forensic significance. When these materials are extremely limited in size, SEM/EDS is often the only suitable method for characterization available in forensic science laboratories.

Because of the inability to access SEM/EDS data from large numbers of materials, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) laboratory believes that this discipline has not realized its full potential. The usefulness of SEM/EDS has been limited by the inability to archive spectra within a utility having a true database architecture. The FBI Laboratory has designed such an X-ray database, consisting of storage, query, and display utilities unique to X-ray spectroscopy.