Informatics tools are an important part of the high-throughput or combinatorial materials development process. Particularly for thin film studies, the rate of sample synthesis and characterization has increased to a point where the throughput of the whole materials development process is limited by the ability to process the characterization data and design new experiments. We describe in this work software tools that we have developed to solve the data management problems. In particular, we discuss the use of extensible markup language (XML) to address the problem of representing structurally varied experimental data in a data management system without having to make modifications to the core software parts whenever the materials processing or characterization tools or sample and data handling procedures change. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.