Earth Science Markup Language: A Solution for Generic Access to Heterogeneous Data Sets

The Earth Science community is processing and analyzing a large amount and variety of data. 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. 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.