MarineXML

MarineXML (A pre-standardisation development for marine data interoperability using XML) is an Accompanying Measures project part-funded by the European Commission. The project aims to demonstrate that Extensible Mark-Up Language (XML) technology can be used to develop a framework that improves the interoperability of data for the marine community and specifically in support of marine observing systems.

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 document provides detail of the XML definition as recommended by the MarineXML pre- standardisation activity. In particular it presents a user manual for the proposed climate science Mark-Up Language (CSML) developed by the NERC Data Grid Project and examples of its use in the marine domain that were used in the project test bed. CSML defines a vocabulary for data exchange based on generic feature types that the MarineXML Testbed demonstrated proved to be effective for marine data exchange.