Syst. Biol. 61(4):675–689, 2012 c The Author(s) 2012. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists. All rights reserved. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. DOI:10.1093/sysbio/sys025 Advance Access publication on February 22, 2012 NeXML: Rich, Extensible, and Verifiable Representation of Comparative Data and Metadata 1, 2,3 4 5 2 RUTGER A. VOS ∗,JAMES P. BALHOFF ,JASON A. CARAVAS ,MARK T. HOLDER ,HILMAR LAPP , WAYNE P. MADDISON6,PETER E. MIDFORD2,ANURAG PRIYAM7,JEET SUKUMARAN5, XUHUA XIA8, AND ARLIN STOLTZFUS9 1NCB Naturalis, Leiden, the Netherlands; 2National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, NC, USA; 3Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA; 4Department of Biological Sciences, Wayne State University, USA; 5Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas, USA; 6Departments of Zoology and Botany, and Beaty Biodiversity Museum, University of British Columbia, Canada; 7Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India; 8Department of Biology, University of Ottawa, Canada; and 9Biochemical Science Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA; ∗Correspondence to be sent to: NCB Naturalis, Postbus 9517, 2300 RA, Leiden, the Netherlands; E-mail:
[email protected]. Received 16 May 2011; reviews returned 29 July 2011; accepted 7 February 2012 Associate Editor: Peter Foster Abstract.—In scientific research, integration and synthesis require a common understanding of where data come from,how much they can be trusted, and what they may be used for.