XML, bioinformatics and data integration.
BACKGROUND
The eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is an emerging standard for structuring documents, notably for the World Wide Web. In this paper, the authors present XML and examine its use as a data language for bioinformatics. In particular, XML is compared to other languages, and some of the potential uses of XML in bioinformatics applications are presented. The authors propose to adopt XML for data interchange between databases and other sources of data. Finally the discussion is illustrated by a test case of a pedigree data model in XML.


BACKGROUND
Emmanuel.Barillot@infobiogen.fr
Achard
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CRI Infobiogen, 523 place des terrasses de l'agora, 91000 Evry, France.
Vaysseix
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G
Barillot
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E
D019295:Computational Biology; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D020407:Internet; D011381:Programming Languages