Lessons in scientific data interoperability: XML and the eMinerals project.

A collaborative environmental eScience project produces a broad range of data, notable as much for its diversity, in source and format, as its quantity. We find that extensible markup language (XML) and associated technologies are invaluable in managing this deluge of data. We describe F<span style='font-size:xx-small;'>o</span> X, a toolkit for allowing Fortran codes to read and write XML, thus allowing existing scientific tools to be easily re-used in an XML-centric workflow.