XML Data Exchange Research Articles

Connector Architecture for Computer-Assisted Design and Manufacturing Systems

Flexible integration concepts for computer-assisted design (CAD) and manufacturing (CAM) systems have been identified as a key to let shipyards select and implement best-in-class software components for their CAD and CAM operations. Current implementations are dominated by bilateral links based on proprietary data exchange formats and are too complex to upgrade parts of a CAD/CAM infrastructure without negative impacts on the other parts. This paper describes the ongoing development of a connector architecture for CAD and CAM systems in shipbuilding. The architecture decouples CAD and CAM systems on the basis of a flexible integration technology, utilizing XML data exchange, lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), and message-based communication. An enterprise reference model describing all relevant shipbuilding business objects forms the basis for the integration. So-called adapters connect the various CAD and CAM systems to the architecture. An automatic nesting solution is presented as a sample business solution in the connector architecture environment.

The space efficiency of XML

XML is the future language for data exchange, and support for XML has been extensive. Although XML has numerous benefits including self-describing data, improved readability, and standardization, there are always tradeoffs in the introduction of new technologies that replace existing systems. The tradeoff of XML versus other data exchange languages is improved readability and descriptiveness versus space efficiency. There has been limited work on examining the space efficiency of XML. This paper compares XML to other data exchange formats. Experiments are performed to measure the overhead in XML files and determine the amount of space used for data, schema, and overhead in a typical XML document.

Common interchange standards for proteomics data: Public availability of tools and schema.

The Proteomics Standards Initiative (PSI) aims to define community standards for data representation in proteomics and to facilitate data comparision, exchange and verification. To this end, a Level 1 Molecular Interaction XML data exchange format has been developed which has been accepted for publication and is freely available at the PSI website (http.//psidev.sf.net/). Several major protein interaction databases are already making data available in this format. A draft XML interchange format for mass spectrometry data has been written and is currently undergoing evaluation whilst work is ongoing to develop a proteomics data integration model, MIAPE.

ArrayExpress--a public repository for microarray gene expression data at the EBI.

ArrayExpress is a new public database of microarray gene expression data at the EBI, which is a generic gene expression database designed to hold data from all microarray platforms. ArrayExpress uses the annotation standard Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) and the associated XML data exchange format Microarray Gene Expression Markup Language (MAGE-ML) and it is designed to store well annotated data in a structured way. The ArrayExpress infrastructure consists of the database itself, data submissions in MAGE-ML format or via an online submission tool MIAMExpress, online database query interface, and the Expression Profiler online analysis tool. ArrayExpress accepts three types of submission, arrays, experiments and protocols, each of these is assigned an accession number. Help on data submission and annotation is provided by the curation team. The database can be queried on parameters such as author, laboratory, organism, experiment or array types. With an increasing number of organisations adopting MAGE-ML standard, the volume of submissions to ArrayExpress is increasing rapidly. The database can be accessed at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress.