XML and computational science

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a specification for document interchange that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed in 1998. In many ways, XML is the lingua franca among programming language enthusiasts, and proponents argue that it could potentially solve the multitude of data management and analysis problems the entire computing industry currently faces. XML might make a real difference, especially in computing, engineering, and the mathematical sciences, in part because we can use it with different languages. The author presents some background and lightweight examples of XML usage, describes some XML component frameworks along with their purpose and applicability to computational science, and discusses some technical obstacles to overcome for the language to be taken seriously in computational science.