Standardization and Software Infrastructure for Gas Hydrate Data Communications

Gas Hydrates Markup Language (GHML) has been under development since 2003 by the CODATA Task Group “Data for Natural Gas Hydrates” as an international standard for data storage and transfer in the gas hydrates community. We describe the development of this evolving communication protocol and show examples of its implementation. In describing this protocol, we concentrate on the most recent updates that have enabled us to include ThermoML, the widely used IUPAC XML communication standard for thermodynamic data, into the GHML schema for the representation of all gas hydrate thermodynamic data. In addition, a new GHML element for the description of crystal structures is described. We then demonstrate a new tool Guided Data Capture for Gas Hydrates for the rapid capture of large amounts of data into GHML format. This tool is freely available and publicly licensed for use by any gas hydrate data producer or collector interested in using the GHML format. An effort will be made to achieve a consensus between scientific journals publishing thermophysical and structural data for gas hydrates to recommend their authors use this new software tool in order to generate GHML data files at the time of the submission of scientific articles. Finally, we will demonstrate how this format can be used to advantage when accessing data from a web-based resource by showing on-line access to GHML files for gas hydrates through a web service.