MatML version 3.0 schema
E F. Begley · 2003
HTML tags specify only how the data are to be formatted for display and convey no description of the data themselves.While this aspect of HTML has enabled the publication of billions of web documents, it, nonetheless, represents a serious drawback to those who wish to automate the processing of the data contained in those documents.To address this problem, the Extensible Markup Language' (XML) was developed and released by the World Wide Web Consortium 1 (W3C), an international group of approximately 500 member organizations dedicated to developing common protocols that promote the evolution of the Web and ensure its interoperability.XML enables communities, such as materials scientists and engineers in the case of MatML, to define their own domain-specific tags and document structure, i.e., they can create their own languages for data management and exchange that, in turn, permit efficient parsing and interpretation of those data via software.The descriptive nature of the MatML tags, such as , , and is plainly evident, permitting the language to be far more intelligible than non-descriptive fixed tagsets such as HTML.At the same time.MatML defines a coherent and consistent document structure for its tags, which ensures that any programming language can be used to parse and process the data in whatever manner required.The formal specification for MatML 3.0 Schema, which covers syntax and semantics, is provided in Appendix A.