SBML Level 3 package: Render, Version 1, Release 1.

Many software tools provide facilities for depicting reaction network diagrams in a visual form. Two aspects of such a visual diagram can be distinguished: the layout (i.e.: the positioning and connections) of the elements in the diagram, and the graphical form of the elements (for example, the glyphs used for symbols, the properties of the lines connecting them, and so on). This document describes the SBML Level 3 Render package that complements the SBML Level 3 Layout package and provides a means of capturing the precise rendering of the elements in a diagram. The SBML Level 3 Render package provides a flexible approach to rendering that is independent of both the underlying SBML model and the Layout information. There can be one block of render information that applies to all layouts or an additional block for each layout. Many of the elements used in the current render specification are based on corresponding elements from the SVG specification. This allows us to easily convert a combination of layout information and render information into a SVG drawing.

The Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) Level 3 Package: Layout, Version 1 Core.

Many software tools provide facilities for depicting reaction network diagrams in a visual form. Two aspects of such a visual diagram can be distinguished: the layout (i.e.: the positioning and connections) of the elements in the diagram, and the graphical form of the elements (for example, the glyphs used for symbols, the properties of the lines connecting them, and so on). For software tools that also read and write models in SBML (Systems Biology Markup Language) format, a common need is to store the network diagram together with the SBML representation of the model. This in turn raises the question of how to encode the layout and the rendering of these diagrams. The SBML Level 3 Version 1 Core specification does not provide a mechanism for explicitly encoding diagrams, but it does provide a mechanism for SBML packages to extend the Core specification and add additional syntactical constructs. The Layout package for SBML Level 3 adds the necessary features to SBML so that diagram layouts can be encoded in SBML files, and a companion package called SBML Rendering specifies how the graphical rendering of elements can be encoded. The SBML Layout package is based on the principle that reaction network diagrams should be described as representations of entities such as species and reactions (with direct links to the underlying SBML elements), and not as arbitrary drawings or graphs; for this reason, existing languages for the description of vector drawings (such as SVG) or general graphs (such as GraphML) cannot be used.