It’s clear to me that the way we will communicate and learn about biology will be very different from the textbooks and journal articles of today. It’ll be done through online simulations and visualizations of biological systems linked with their raw data sources.

A number of XML vocabularies have been or are being developed that are important tools towards achieving this goal. One is the Biological Pathway Exchange (BioPAX) vocabulary.

The team largely responsible for creating BioPAX over a number of years just published a paper “The BioPAX community standard for pathway data sharing” in the September 9, 2010 online issue of Nature Biotechnology.