Using XML Encoding Agricultural Resource Data for Sharing and Interoperability

摘要

An extensible Markup Language (XML) is emerging as a standard for structured-data transfer. XML offers a widely adopted standard way of representing text and data in a format that can be processed without much human or machine intelligence. Information formatted in XML can be exchanged across platforms, languages, and applications, and can be used with a wide range of development tools and utilities. However, XML is a meta-language for the construction of a language useful for data. The actual tag-set and structures must be defined for each particular application, such as geography, agriculture, and so on. Schema definitions (using e.g. DTD, XSDL, Schema) are the formal representation of the tag-set. A general data-model for geo-spatial information has been developed and standardized through ISO. The feature model suits a database-oriented data-store, in contrast to the conventional map-oriented "coverage" approach. This paper first discusses the XML in terms of agriculture sciences and then presents the development of XML encoding for soil spatial data for data sharing and interoperability.