It is designed to provide a standard way for describing content, structure and semantic information of a data file, thus facilitating development of dataset-independent search, visualization, and analysis tools without requiring data to be in any particular format or formats. The ESML, is a means for describing the content, structure and semantic information about different Earth Science data formats. Content metadata describes the contents of a file in human-readable terms.
Syntactic metadata describe the structure of the file in machine-readable terms.
The third type of information is semantic metadata, which describe the contents of a file in machine-readable terms such that an application can interpret the data in an intelligent manner. ESML will provide this crucial information. This file is not only human readable but is also machine readable and interpretable. Any application that can parse an ESML file will now be able to read the data file regardless of its format. As a bonus, the user can also publish the ESML on the web.