XSIL: Extensible Scientific Interchange Language

We motivate and define the XSIL language as a flexible, hierarchical, extensible transport language for scientific data objects. The entire object may be represented in the file, or there may be metadata in the XSIL file, with a powerful, fault-tolerant linking mechanism to external data. The language is based on XML, and is designed not only for parsing and processing by machines, but also for presentation to humans through web browsers and web-database technology. There is a natural mapping between the elements of the XSIL language and the object model into which they are translated by the parser. As well as common objects (Parameter, Array, Time, Table), we have extended XSIL to include the IGWDFrame, used by gravitational-wave observatories.