Gas Hydrate Markup Language as it pertains to Laboratory Data

Tom Smith¹, John Ripmeester², Dendy Sloan³, Tsutomu Uchida⁴

¹Queens College of the City University of New York, USA
²The Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences, National Research Council of Canada, Canada
³Center for Hydrate Research, Colorado School of Mines, USA
⁴Hokkaido University, Japan

The ever increasing volume of data in modern society coupled with the critical need for simplified and efficient sharing of said data is exemplified in almost every sector of society.  Nowhere is this perhaps more evident than the scientific community where data located at one research facility could prove invaluable to another.  Historically it has been sufficient to merely store such data in isolated and disparate databases for later retrieval and reporting.  Data was then subsequently requested and provided to third party entities in a variety of ad-hoc formats leaving the researcher with the unfortunate and daunting task of having to process these various non-standardized extracts, rather than being able to focus on the actual research at hand.

It has now become absolutely essential to facilitate the exchange of data in internationally standardized and accepted formats such as is the Gas Hydrate Markup Language (aka: GHML) pioneered and developed by the CODATA Gas Hydrate Data Task Group. The GHML is an Extensible Markup Language (aka: XML) based implementation and standard which is readily designed to allow the modeling and subsequent exchange of data pertaining to the more common Gas Hydrate constructs encountered in the research environment.  By careful coordination with the Gas Hydrate research community, a workable and viable GHML schema has effectively been realized.

“Laboratory Data” is one of the three constituent modules comprising the GHML schema, the others being “Field” and “Modeling”.  This module describes the characteristics of natural and synthetic gas hydrates as they pertain to data acquired via analysis within a laboratory environment.  Such data includes the preservation history (i.e.: technique, pressurization gas and pressure, etc), Macroscopic data (i.e.: water-sediment ratio, appearance, P-T behaviour etc) as well as that of the Microscopic realm.

Concurrent with the architecting of the GHML, existing related markup languages and standards were investigated and researched in detail to help ensure compliance with industry accepted standards and practices where applicable.  As such careful concern was given to such items as the integration of preexisting markup language constructs, enumeration, naming conventions, attributes and abstraction.

In summary the “Laboratory Data” module coupled with both “Field” and “Modeling” create an effective, efficient and robust GHML schema allowing the scientific research community to readily exchange data in a clear and unambiguous format.

Keywords: GHML, CODATA, laboratory, gas hydrate, metadata