LabBook releases XML Standard for genomic research

The new standard is designed to allow life science researchers, suppliers and content and service providers, to interact and exchange information through a universal data language.

By Editor on Jan 13, 2001

The new standard is designed to allow life science researchers, suppliers and content and service providers, to interact and exchange information through a universal data language. According to LabBook BSML enables the creation, delivery, integration and storage of documents containing complex sequence information, features and annotations.

Using the new system, researchers will be able to exchange information through an XML/BSML email, the genogram, which is created and read by LabBook's Genomic XML Viewer and genomic XML Browser. LabBook intends to support the standard by providing the language specification (BSML DTD Version 2.2) and Genomic XML Viewer to the life science community. The company also plans to develop XML converters, allowing the integration of disparate data.

Our clients and partners have come to us because they need an affordable, robust XML-based solution for data integration, organization and visualization that can be used effectively by all their end users, not just the bioinformatics specialists, said Adel Mikhail, LabBook Vice President for Strategic Development. Our technology is making genomic data more meaningful to biologists.

LabBook's solution is formats data and query results for delivery as a standardized XML representation that is persistent and reusable. The combination of XML data, XML converters and XML-aware software is expected to facilitate the discovery process by enabling the researcher to integrate and annotate data and query results within a visual and interactive environment.

A major challenge in research today is accessing, organizing and integrating information that is in diverse, often incompatible formats from various sources distributed locally and over the Internet, said Jeffrey Spitzner, LabBook CSO. For example, results of database queries delivered as database tables or HTML files are hard to manage and difficult to integrate. Yet, scientists must be able to share and work with their data and analytical results in order to apply their expertise and understand the underlying biology. A new era of discovery will be enabled by providing a standard XML data format that captures the richness and the underlying data itself, combined with interactive visual presentations that are meaningful to the life sciences community.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) was developed by the World Wide Web
Consortium, also responsible for HTML standards, to handle what the HTML web
browser format cannot accomplish: the representation and network transmission
of rich structured data (semantic content). BSML is an extensible language
specification and container for bioinformatic data. BSML was created by
LabBook developers under a 1997 grant from the National Human Genome Research
Institute (NHGRI) as an evolving public domain standard for the bioinformatics
community. Improvements to BSML were made in collaboration with leaders in the
field.