PERL/PYTHON PROGRAMMING WORKSHOP (Documentation for 2003 meeting) APIII Oct 8-10, 2003 Pittsburgh, PA Jules Berman and James Harrison Perl and Python are popular open source scripting languages. Perl and Python interpreters are available for virtually every operating system, and the scripts you write will work on any platform with an installed intepreter. Many common informatics tasks can be easily performed with a few lines of Perl or Python. This year's Perl/Python workshop (the second APIII Perl/Python workshop) will feature simple Perl and Python scripts that can help you use meta data documents (primarily XML). After a short review of meta data, we will describes scripts that can convert Excel files to XML files, convert XML files to html files, conduct queries in individual XML files, and conduct queries across heterogeneous XML files. We will show how Perl can be used to validate Tissue Microarray data files that conform to the API's newly released Tissue Microarray Data Exchange Specification. All scripts used in the workshop can be downloaded from the API website.