Using XML to improve the productivity and robustness in application development in geosciences

In this paper, we describe an approach to apply Extensible Markup Language (XML) technologies to improve the robustness of geological and geophysical applications as well as to increase the efficacy in the application development process. Geological and geophysical applications are often data centric, I/O intensive and their development is incremental. Therefore, significant amount of development resources is devoted to the design and reengineering of the container data structures that store data. This process is time consuming, mechanical and error prone. Normally, ad hoc parsers are necessary for reading inputs, as well as numerous filters, or adapters to transform the data for integration with other legacy applications. Most of this can be avoided by using XML-related technologies. XML has a type system schema that can be used to define input parameters and constraints. The XML parser can validate the input data using the constraints defined in the schema. Exporting results in XML format allows the use of Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to transform XML output to any other format necessary for integration with legacy applications. Additionally, XML-data binding code can be automatically generated in specified languages such C++ and Java. We used this approach to develop applications for seismic ray-tracing and basin modeling with great success, and the major benefits of this approach were the significant gains in productivity during the developement and application robustness.