RFC 3823 (rfc3823) - Page 2 of 8

MIME Media Type for the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML)

RFC 3823         Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML)        June 2004


   definition language.  The SBML community hopes that a standardized
   MIME media type will help researchers share models on a larger scale,
   drawing more heavily on the capabilities of the world-wide web.

   A detailed exposition of SBML and its uses within the systems biology
   community is available in references [HUCKA2003], [FINNEY2003], and
   [HUCKA2004].

2.  IANA Registration

   This section registers application/sbml+xml as a MIME media type
   according to the parameters set forth in [RFC 2048].

   MIME media type name: application

   MIME subtype name: sbml+xml

   Required parameters: none.

   Optional parameters: none.

      There is no charset parameter.  Character handling has identical
      semantics to the case where the charset parameter of the
      "application/xml" media type is omitted, as described in section
      3.2 of [RFC 3023].  Note that SBML level 2 is defined to have UTF-8
      encoding [SBML2-1, section 4.1].

   Encoding considerations:

      Same as described in section 3.2 of [RFC 3023].

   Security considerations:

      The security considerations described in section 7 of [RFC 3470]
      all potentially apply to sbml+xml documents.  In particular,
      sbml+xml documents might contain the results of proprietary
      biological research that their owner may wish to keep private.

   The XML schema for sbml+xml provides for no active or executable
   content.

   Interoperability considerations:

      The information in an sbml+xml document describes an abstract
      model of biochemical reactions.  It is not tied to any particular
      software application, and indeed the primary purpose of SBML is to
      make these models readable and writable by many different software
      applications.



Kovitz                       Informational