XML, bioinformatics and data integration

Motivation: The extensible Markup Language (XML) is an emerging standard fo r structuring documents, notably for the World Wide Web. In this paper, the authors present XML and examine its use as a data language for bioinformat ics. In particular, XML is compared to other languages, and some of the pot ential uses of XML in bioinformatics applications are presented. The author s propose to adopt XML for data interchange between databases and other sou rces of data. Finally the discussion is illustrated by a test case of a ped igree data model in XML.