Olken spoke about various goings on in the metadata standards community and these activities might affect the bio-ontology standards effort. It lacks any query language, and the exchange format is not conducive to human readability or generation. Olken then gave a brief update on the status of the XML Schema Language efforts. These are the subject of the XML Schema WG of the World Wide Web consortium. Presently, the group has adopted a charter and is working on its first draft document.
Data typing is one of the key issues being debated.
Inheritance, composite data types are also on the agenda. RDF was intended to encode metadata concerning web documents. The RDF Schema document is presently being balloted and faces opposition from Microsoft. Brief mention was made of the OMG's Lexicon Query Service, an API for interrogating a terminology server. Olken then noted that there was considerable activity on terminology development, standardization, and representation in the medical community and that these efforts were interesting both intellectually and because molecular biology is increasingly intertwined with medicine.