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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 Fo 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.

We describe RMCS as one of the first tools for grid computing that integrates data and metadata management into a single job submission system. The system is easy to use, with client tools that are easy to install. Although the RMCS system was developed as a prototype, it is now in production use and a number of scientific studies have been completed using it.

We describe the use of new eScience tools to support collaboration, including the use of XML data representations to support shared viewing of the information content of data, metadata tools for documenting data and Web 2.0 social networking tools for documenting ideas and the collaboration process. This latter work has led to the development of the http://SciSpace.net Web resource.