Title of Paper: Earth Science Markup Language: A Solution for
Generic Access to Heterogeneous Data Sets
Principal Author: Mr. Rahul Ramachandran
Abstract: The Earth Science community is processing and
analyzing a large amount and variety of data from space and ground-based
observations and from models. These data are generally stored in different data
formats, which forces the scientists to spend a significant amount of time in
writing specialized, data format specific readers. One solution to the data
format heterogeneity problem is to define a standard data format for all earth
science datasets, but the science community has found this solution to be
impractical. However, this preprocessing burden can by alleviated by using the
Earth Science Markup Language (ESML). ESML is a specialized markup language for
Earth Science metadata. Based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XMLTM), ESML
allows data descriptions to be written in a standard fashion. The unique
feature about ESML is that it not only describes the content and structure of
the data, but also provides semantic information, such that the applications
reading a data file can geo-temporally navigate the data and convert then into
useful scientific quantities. ESML will allow wider interoperability of Earth
Science services, enabling researchers to author, discover, and interpret Earth
Science information, and to work with data in a variety of formats and
structures. Another advantage is that the effort involved to describe legacy
data formats in ESML will be small. In this paper, we shall describe the Earth
Science Markup Language (ESML), being currently developed at the Information
Technology and Systems Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.