HYDROML: CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF A HYDROLOGIC MARKUP LANGUAGE

摘要

This paper presents a conceptual development of a markup language that is specific to the hydrologic community. The predicted vast increase in data volume as well as the heterogeneity of the data used across the many disciplines in hydrology, have mandated the development of a standardized description of data in order to facilitate storage, querying, analysis, retrieval and exchange among data holding cites and end users. To this a so-called metadata standard needs to be adopted from which the specific community metadata needs can be derived, in this case the ISO Metadata norm 19115. In conjunction with a formal syntactic structure or language convention like XML, a hydrologic markup language can be developed. The ensuing difficulties and challenges, like the diversity of data holdings, and formats are highlighted and an approach is presented that conceptualizes the need to define data ontologies and a common vocabulary. Finally, some examples are presented to illustrate the use of semantic and syntactic standards in creating data-descriptions for hydrologic data.