AN XML VOCABULARY FOR TMATS

Abstract

XML is a simple, powerful way to agree on data transfers between organizations, applications and/or computer systems. XML was originally developed to separate data content definition from the display of data on a web page. XML is based on a subset of the Standardized General Markup Language (SGML), which means XML uses a tag-based syntax similar to Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). Whereas HTML uses fixed tags to display data, XML uses custom designed tags to describe data. XML provides a simple, standard, portable, and flexible way to transfer data between applications. This could provide a useful way to transfer telemetry attributes data between customers and systems. Currently, there is not a significant amount of support for the use of the Telemetry Attributes Transfer Standard (TMATS). Telemetry vendors still use their own formats, customers maintain their own databases, and support facilities/ranges promote the use of their own implementations. TMATS was supposed to define a common ground to transfer data definitions, but the tools to TMATS have not come about. TMATS is a well defined, structured specification that maps into XML extremely well. Even though XML is a fairly new technology, there are already many tools available to support XML parsing with more becoming available. This makes XML an excellent choice to supplement TMATS for the interchange of telemetry attribute information. This paper provides an initial attempt at defining the language and structure for an XML vocabulary of TMATS.