XML: A GLOBAL STANDARD FOR THE FLIGHT TEST COMMUNITY

Abstract

Much effort has been spent on developing physical layer standards to ease multi-vendor inter-operability. However as anyone familiar with real-life system integration knows a large gap exists in defining system configuration and set-up, not just between vendors but also between different groups on the base. Different solutions to this problem have been attempted (for example TMATS). However, the emergence of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as a commercial standard presents a new opportunity to define a powerful and extensible tool for data-interchange between different systems. This paper introduces the self-documenting standard for information exchange that is XML. A generic model for flight test data acquisition is presented. Finally, an XML vocabulary (or schema) based on this model is proposed. This schema could form the basis for an industry wide XML standard to simplify the problem of data interchange between vendors, between programs, even between different databases in the same organisation.