Developing an Extensible Markup Language (XML) Application for DFO Marine Data Exchange via the Web.

摘要

Generic data objects, or bricks, have been developed to describe the grouping characteristics of ocean data and metadata. Full definitions for the bricks were developed and the bricks where then implemented in an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) environment. The XML allows added format and content restrictions on XML elements. A full XML schema was developed for the structure representing ocean profile data. A data exchange application was then developed by the Marine Environmental Data Service (MEDS), Institute of Ocean Sciences (IOS) and the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (BIO) (in cooperation with Defence R&D Canada) to convert profile data from the three ocean labs to the defined XML structure. Applications were developed in Java, Fortran and extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT) to port the XML structure to the local formats. Results show that the use of XML has merit in the ocean data community. However, considerable intellectual effort is required in defining the bricks, structure and definitions. Coding requirements are minimal in comparison and should not be considered an impediment to the development of an XML-based exchange language.