Abstract
Natural gas hydrates, as an important potential fuels, flow assurance hazards, and possible factors initiating the submarine geo-hazard and global climate change, have attracted the interest of scientists all over the world. After two centuries of hydrate research, a great amount of scientific data on gas hydrates has been accumulated. Therefore the means to manage, share, and exchange these data have become an urgent task. At present, metadata (Markup Language) is recognized as one of the most efficient ways to facilitate data management, storage, integration, exchange, discovery and retrieval. Therefore the CODATA Gas Hydrate Data Task Group proposed and specified Gas Hydrate Markup Language (GHML) as an extensible conceptual metadata model to characterize the features of data on gas hydrate. This article introduces the details of modeling portion of GHML.