how to convert odour in digital format

Hi all,
Is it possible to convert odour (smell) in a digital format.If yes then how? Plz specify some good site links if possible

Speaking as an ex flavor chemist - NO. Natural odors may have hundreds of components, many of which are not well known. Sure you can specify certain chemical that are the predominant note - say N-Methyl-N-Anthranilate (probably wrong spelling it was a long time ago) will get you a fake grape flavor but not the real thing.
Bill

Do you think it's fundamentally impossible to do this, or do you think it will be possible with sufficiently advanced technology?

Hi ROb,
I think fundamentally it should be possible to do it using some technique.But according to william that technique is not yet developed.

Again speaking as an ex flavor chemist, odor synthesis can give perfectly satisfactory results without including ALL of the odor chemicals, but I think you would need to have thousands of chemicals available if you wanted to be able to synthesize a wide range of odors.
I can certainly imagine an OML (Odor Markup Language) (hee hee - new acronym!) that would specify chemicals and proportions in XML. You would not have to use pure chemicals either, maybe stock mixtures "floral" "citrus" "musty" etc etc. would do the trick.
This is an area in which a HUGE amount of money and research is involved since odor plays such a big part in selling many consumer items. I don't think any of the pioneering efforts in smell-o-vision was considered a sucess, but with nano-technology, who knows.
Bill

Hi all ,
Thanx for posting your reply for my query.I asked this question to my few friends and i got some interesting information .I want to just discuss that idea with u to confirm its practical possiblities..
How we identify the sound?
nothing but the frequency changes of the air.
How can we make Sound?
make changes in the frequency of air using some
instruments or device.
The same way
How can we identify the smell?
molecules will change as the odour is changing .So if we can develop
some device which can catch this changes we can convert it to analog format
and then to digital..

There was a company called DigiScents in Oakland CA that had created a customised atomizer (they called it the "IScent Personal Scent Synthesizer")that contained a set number of scented oils that functioned as "primitive scents" that could be combined in order to create an entire range of smells and it could interface with web pages via
a xml-based (I believe) markup language. I remember reading about it and seeing some tv news clips about it when they first came out. I believe
they even wanted to partner with RealAudio, to have "streaming scents".
I don't know how accurate it was from a food
chemistry stand-point, but it sure was a cool idea. I think they had about a 100 different scents, but I never smelled any of them.
Why send flame somebody, when you can just send
a fart!

It's a shame they went out of business.
-Andreas