Modeling Hydrates and the Gas Hydrate Markup Language

Willa Wang¹, George Moridis², Jason Wang¹, Yun Xiao¹ and Jianhui Li¹

¹Scientific Database Center, Computer Network Information Center, CAS
²Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, USA

Natural gas hydrate, as an important potential fuel in future, a flow assurance hazard, and a possible factor initiating the submarine geo-hazard and global climate change, has attracted the interests of scientists all over the world.  After two centuries of hydrate research, a great mount of scientific data on gas hydrate has been accumulated.  So how to manage, share, and exchange these data has become an urgent task.

At present, Metadata is recognized as one of the most efficient ways to facilitate data management, storage, integration, exchange, discovery and retrieve.  Therefore the CODATA Gas Hydrate Data Task Group proposed and specified Gas Hydrate Markup Language (GHML) as an extensible conceptual metadata model to characterize the features of data on gas hydrate.

The “Model”, portion of GHML, has grouped information about gas hydrate modeling.  It consisted of such elements like name, purpose, main theories, and input/output parameters that generally been used in hydrate behavior modeling.  The generation of this part of the GHML was essentially based on a modeling software named “TOUGH-Fx/Hydrate” which is widely used for modeling gas hydrate resources.  “TOUGH-Fx/Hydrate” is a good representative of the state-of-the-art model in this research field.  So, although the GHML used a single software program as a reference, elements abstracted from it were suitable for most applications.

During the development of this part, we consulted many other international metadata standards (Markup Languages) which provided good reference to structure design, naming convention, annotation format and etc.  The consistency with these existing international standards ensured good communication and transferability between GHML and other international standard markup languages.

The application of “Model” to gas hydrate research will not only help users to find useful tools on hydrate modeling but also facilitate modeling data transportation and exchange.

Keywords: GHML, model, gas hydrate, metadata