UNLEASHING THE POWER OF XML

Abstract

Over the last few years XML has been growing in importance as a language for describing the meta-data associated with a complete flight test. Three years ago ACRA CONTROL introduced XidML as an open, published XML standard describing flight test data acquisition from the air to the ground. Recently, XML has been adopted by the TMATS RCC committee and is currently being studied by iNET. While many papers have focused on what XML is and why it is a powerful language, few have related this to practical benefits for the end user. This paper attempts to address this gap. The paper describes simple cost effective tools for generating XML through an intuitive GUI, validating XML information against a schema and transforming XML into useful reports. In particular a suite of value added tools for XidML is described.