XML representations of pathway data: a comparison

Standardisation and integration of pathway data is currently an interesting topic within bioinformatics with several consortia, e.g. SBML, PSI and BioPAX. These groups use or consider XML for representation of their standards. Furthermore, XML is used by many of the existing databases containing pathway information for export and exchange of data. In this paper we compare some of the XML representations used by the standardisation committees and existing databases. The contribution of the paper is the comparison and evaluation of the representations together with a discussion on implications for information discovery and integration.