Date: Dec. 22, 2000
Link: http://ecocyc.panbio.com/xol/
Source Author or Organization: Peter Karp, Pangea Systems, Vinay Chaudhri, SRI International, Jerome Thomere,SRI International

XML-Based Ontology Exchange Language (XOL) is a language for exchange of ontologies, created to facilitate the creation of shared ontologies (originally developed for use in bioinformatics).

The language is intended to be used as an intermediate language for transferring ontologies among different database systems, ontology-development tools or application programs.

An example would be a group developing a scientific database using the Oracle DBMS. The group could translate the DBMS schema from SQL into XOL, and then publish the resulting file on the Web for reference by users of the database or other groups who are developing similar databases.