The MIGS/MIMS checklist developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) aims to enrich our ever growing data collection of genomic and metagenomic sequences. Therefore, the checklist defines what minimal list of contextual data attributes has to be added to the sequences in order to conform to the MIGS/MIMS specification. However, MIGS/MIMS itself does not specify how the contextual data should be documented; thus the GSC is developing the Genomic Contextual Data Markup Language (GCDML), which provides the official implementation of MIGS/MIMS. Using XML Schema, GCDML implements a large set of strongly typed contextual meta data descriptions and so called MIGS-Reports in XML. These reports define in detail how the contextual data is to be documented. The validity and conformance to the MIGS/MIMS specification can then be verified with standard XML parsers. After one year of development and several iterations of refinements, the structure of MIGS Reports is stabilized and has proven to be easily human editable. However, the main aim of GCDML is to provide a machine readable representation of contextual data that facilitates the capture, exchange, and comparison of large amount of data in Web Service environments. More information can be found on the GSC WIKI page: http://gensc.org/gc_wiki/index.php/GCDML Field, D., G. Garrity, T. Gray, N. Morrison, J. Selengut, P. Sterk, T. Tatusova, N. Thomson, M. J. Allen, S. V. Angiuoli, et al. 2008. The minimum information about a genome sequence (MIGS) specification. Nat. Biotechnol. 26:541-547. Renzo Kottmann, Tanya Gray, Sean Murphy, Leonid Kagan, Saul Kravitz, Thierry Lombardot, Dawn Field, Frank Oliver Glockner, Genomic Standards Consortium. 2008. A standard MIGS/MIMS compliant XML Schema: toward the development of the Genomic Contextual Data Markup Language (GCDML). OMICS. 12(2)
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