Wikipedia
BeerXML is a free, fully defined XML data description standard designed for the exchange of beer brewing recipes and other brewing data. Tables of recipes as well as other records such as hop schedules and malt bills can be represented using BeerXML for use by brewing software.
BeerXML is an open standard and as a subset of Extensible Markup Language (XML) BeerXML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable
BeerXML is supported by a number of web sites, computer programmes and an increasing number of Android Windows Phone and iOS apps.
Plugins and extensions supporting BeerXML have been written for a variety of platforms including Ruby via RubyGems, WordPress, PHP and Javascript
Brewing hardware manufacturers have begun to incorporate BeerXML into their systems and third party plugins and patches are being developed for brewery control hardware and embedded systems allowing the automation and fine control and timing of processes such as mashing and potentially fermentation.