Climate Science Modelling Language (CSML)

CSML is a standards-based data model and GML application schema for atmospheric and oceanographic data. The CSML work is being performed as part of the NERC DataGRID project (http://ndg.badc.rl.ac.uk/csml/). Andrew Woolf is the project lead.

The Climate Science Modelling Language (CSML) attempts to encapsulate important semantics of climate science data in a generic manner. In essence, it provides an abstract semantic model for representing a range of data objects of relevance to climate science. By so doing, it may be leveraged to build intelligent services for data subsetting, aggregation, processing, etc.

CSML is an application schema of the Geography Markup Language. It represents the logical structure and semantic content of a dataset. Specific data object types are called ‘feature types’. They provide a common information model for oceanographic and
atmospheric data types. A dual purpose of CSML is to provide a ‘wrapper’ mechanism to encapsulate legacy filebased data, casting them onto feature instances.