XML Based Scientific Data Management Facility

Abstract. The World Wide Web consortium has developed an Extensible Markup Language(XML) to support the building of better information management infrastructures. The scientificcomputing community realizing the benefits of XML has designed markup languages for scientific data.In this paper, we propose a XML based scientific data management facility, XDMF. The project ismotivated by the fact that even though a lot of scientific data is being generated, it is not being sharedbecause of lack of standards and infrastructure support for discovering and transforming the data. Theproposed data management facility can be used to discover the scientific data itself, the transformationfunctions, and also for applying the required transformations. We have built a prototype system of theproposed data management facility that can work on different platforms. We have implemented thesystem using Java, and Apache XSLT engine Xalan. To support remote data and transformationfunctions, we had to extcnd the XSLT specification and the Xalan package.Key Words. XML, scientific data management, digital librarySubject Classification. Scientific Data Management1. Introduction. We are entering the second phase of the World Wide Web revolution whercthe target for information is not a human, but a machine. In the first phase, a digital document wasrepresented using HTML, which is rendered for display by browsers for human consumption. It was soonrealized that HTML representation of a digital document has limitations. In particular, it makes thedocument unsuitable for machine processing, which is essential for building a distributed informationinfrastructure that can be efficiently searched and managed. The World Wide Web consortium hasdeveloped an Extensible Markup Language (XML) to support the building of better informationmanagement infrastructures. XML allows a community to describe its own grammar that meets its needsmore efficiently. For example, it is now possible for a community to separate the structure of thedocument from its presentation. One can define a set of tags to represent the abstract structure of thedocument, which makes it suitable for machine processing.The scientific computing community, also realizing the benefits of XML, has designed markuplanguages to represent scientific data. There are several initiatives focusing on this issue, such as theExtensible Scientific Interchange Language (XSIL) [1], and the eXtensible Data Format (XDF) [2]. Wehope that finally the community will agree on one language for the scientific data representation. Webelieve that this language will have two components: a core component describing the structure of thescientific data and the second, a discipline specific component, may contain metadata describing thecircumstances of the data collection and other information for understanding the data details.A workshop on Interfaces to Scientific Data Archives organized by California Institute ofTechnology made a strong case for an XML based scientific data management infrastructure [3]. In thispaper, we propose a XML based scientific data management facility (XDMF). The project is motivated by