This briefing lays out the initial objectives and intent of the Data Exchange Working Group of the Metabolomics Standards Initiative (MSI), which operates under the aegis of the Metabolomics Society. The MSI has now reached a significant milestone in publishing a complete set of draft reporting requirements, simultaneously providing to the Data Exchange Working Group a set of drivers that function, for our purposes, as a series of specifications of the data and metadata that the products endorsed or developed by the Data Exchange Working Group should be able to effectively contain. We here describe our view of the existing resources that can be put to use, the ‘functionality gaps’ that need to be filled and the way in which we envisage these existing and planned resources fitting together to provide a framework that firstly, answers the needs of the metabolomics community and secondly, addresses the issues raised by the prospect of integrating metabolomics workflow descriptions and data with that from other domains, such as proteomics, genomics and transcriptomics.