The C2M project: a wrapper generator for chemistry and biology

Modern science relies on the availability of resources accessible over the web. Each resource uses its own format, among other things because science is highly dynamic and tasks change frequently. In other words, format multiplicity is a fact of life. Data interoperability relies on the presence of wrappers. The C2M project aims to build a system that supports quick and easy generation of lightweight wrappers by providing a language in which formats can be specified. Because the project was originally aimed at chemical applications, the name “C2M? is a chemical formula-like abbreviation of “chemical configurable middleware?. For reasons of exposition, we will be looking at a simple chemical format in this paper. C2M can be succesfully applied in other domains as well. The C2M language has been designed to be easy to learn and use, yet it is sufficiently formal to allow unambiguous description of formats. There is a provision for including documentation, and in fact specification writers are encouraged to do so copiously. Underlying the design of the C2M language is the intuition that there is such a thing as language ergonomics.