Steering Committee X 4 th March 2005 Exploitation Committee X MarineXML_Position_Paper_R4r0.doc Public X Page 1 of 12 Using XML Technology for Marine Data Exchange A Position Paper of the MarineXML Initiative Keiran Millard 1 , Rob Atkinson 2 , Andrew Woolf 3 , Roy Lowry 4 , Pieter Haaring 5 , Francisco Hernandez 6 , Torill Hamre 7 , Dan Pillich 8 , Holger Bothien 8 , Ward Vanden Berghe 6 , Ian Johnson 3 , Brian Matthews 3 , Hans Dahlin 9 , Nic Flemming 9 , Vladimir Vladymyrov 10 , Bev Meckenzie 11 , Alan Edwards 12 , Willem van der Hoeven 5 , Quillon Harphen 1 , Gil Ross 13 1 HR Wallingford, 2 Social Change Online, 3 Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, 4 British Oceanographic Data Centre, 5 RIKZ, 6 VLIZ, 7 Nansen Environmental Remote Sensing Center, 8 Seven Cs, 9 EuroGOOS, 10 IOC/IODE, 11 UK Marine Information Council, 12 European Commission, 13 Met Office UK January 2005 1. Abstract The eXtensible Mark-Up Language (XML) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium can be used to develop a framework that improves the interoperability of data in support of marine observing systems. There have been several initiatives investigating how this can be achieved in practice, but to date there has been no strong direction that the marine community should take. This paper presents the findings of an international project tasked with providing such direction. In particular it provides ‘pre-standardisation’ advice and justification to the international marine community on the use of XML standards for data interoperability. Importantly this embraces the very broad extent of the marine community, covering the very many disciplines and domain areas that exist. Keywords: XML, GML, ISO-TC211, Marine Data Exchange 2. Introduction The huge diversity of data formats, proprietary data management systems, analysis packages, numerical models and visualization tools complicate the processing, management and accessibility of marine data. This diversity severely limits the multiple re-use of data and reduces our access to the data. Additionally the present complexity of accessing and integrating data makes it a tedious, often labour intensive to generate knowledge of marine processes and risks associated with activities in the marine environment. Today, the marine community is in a situation where large volumes of data are collected by an increasing number of agencies and scientists for an increasing number of purposes. The desire to build regional or global databases, aggregating data from multiple sources is also increasing. This is evident at the European level through the development of INSPIRE 1 and GMES 2 and at an international level through GEO 3 and GOOS 4 . The need for a common data framework to enable this integration has now become an essential component of building our knowledge of the marine environment. It has been considered that the eXtensible Mark-Up Language (XML) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium can be used to develop such a framework. This would build on the approaches that have been used in other domain areas such as the geospatial (Lake R, 2004), chemistry, genetics and finance (Millard K, 2003). 1 www.ec-gis.org/inspire/ 2 www.gmes.info 3 http://earthobservations.org/ 4 ioc.unesco.org/goos/