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From BioSchemas

Schemas are interfaces / contracts between applications / developers. Therefore, schemas should not be owned nor defined by a single person or institution. They have to be defined in a collaborative way - thus BioSchemas.

Introduction

The need for data exchange especially in life sciences is a key factor for success. Because of that many organizations and companies gone over to replace their flat file formats by XML-based formats. This offers a whole lot of advantages over flat file formats:

• A common, easy and well-known syntax and in case of XML Schema also a common, extensive and flexible type system.
• Both, XML and XML Schema, are supported by many programming languages, operating systems, application platforms, software libraries, authoring tools and additional specifications and also by major organizations and companies.
• The possibility to validate XML documents against their appropriate schemas without the need for extra programming tasks.

However many XML-based formats for biological data are not compatible to each other. What is missing is a common type framework in analogy to the XML Schema Types and the standardization of element and attribute names. Only the concrete arrangement of the different elements and attributes should be open to the Application-specific formats.

What is BioSchemas?

Although, XML stands for "Extensible Markup Language", most XML formats are not extensible, i.e. they do not allow to incorporate data from foreign formats. The BioSchemas project tries to overcome this limitation by using an Extensible Schema Architecture which is mainly based on a common type framework, multiple replaceable building blocks and flexible lightweight document formats - see picture on the right side.

The aim of the BioSchemas project is to provide an XML Schema framework by offering libraries of basic types and frequently used building blocks, so that XML formats share a common foundation. This will improve the interoperability in biological data exchange by eliminating awkward type conversations and structure transformations.

Besides, the development of new specifications becomes easier, because existing definitions and declarations can be imported into new schemas and so decrease the expense of development.

To guarantee that the schemas provided here fulfill the requirements for a broad range of applications the development of the schemas is driven by an open community process and thus all members affected are involved in the evolution of this project.

What next?

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