In 2005 the Genomics Standards Consortium was formed to address this problem. Renzo Kottman from the Max-Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany talked about software development within the GSC, and specifically about his own project: the Genomic Contextual Data Markup Language, or GCDML. GCDML is an XML-based standard for describing everything associated with a genomic or a metagenomic sample: where it was taken from , under what conditions, which protocols were used to extract, sequence, assemble, finish and analyze the metagenome.