Describing data on the grid

The development of standards for describing format, structure and semantic content of data is essential for its automatic manipulation within a grid. We describe two related pieces of work that aim to address this need. BinX is a language with supporting tools and library for describing binary data, developed as part of the eDIKT project at the National eScience Centre. The data format description language (DFDL) is a global grid forum working group, which draws on the BinX work and aims to develop an extensible standard for describing these features of data formats.