DEVELOPING A GENERIC GEOSCIENCE MARKUP LANGUAGE: GEOSCIML

The British Geological Survey (BGS) has been collecting geoscience data since it was founded in 1835, and is the UK national centre for earth sciences covering all the major disciplines within geology and geophysics. It operates both in the UK and internationally . A major role of the BGS is one of data custodian, and in recent years has put major effort into making this data more accessible both to internal and external users, and a key component to this is the use of web technologies including XML for data transfer.

It is possible for an organization simply to design an XML schema for a particular problem at hand and make it generally available. Though not ideal, this is an improvement on having many varieties of non XML data formats. This is because the XML format is partially self-documenting and provides common methods for parsing files, obtaining their structure and transforming them to alternative formats. If communities share a common data transfer model for their domains of interest, data exchange becomes even easier.

Initial work at BGS with XML was based on in-house DTDs for particular applications. Having gained experience with these we believe it is important for further work to develop some common ML for exchange of generic geoscience information. This is not being done from scratch, but as an application of the OpenGIS consortium's (OGC) Geography Markup Language (GML) and building upon the applied geoscience domain focussed eXploration and Mining Markup Language (XMML), by using XML Schema modularity capabilities. These are both fairly complex specifications and this paper describes our experiences in developing from them in an incremental and piece-wise manner to cover some particular geoscientific domains of interest all within one overarching GeoSciML schema. With the support of suitable software tools the model development can proceed in an iterative manner with rapid prototyping incorporating potential domain users feedback. We propose that a similar development process be extended to the wider geoscience community, with the support of bodies such as the International Union of Geological Sciences' (IUGS) Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information and the OGC, so that GeoSciML can become a common language for generic geoscience information exchange using XML based web processes.