INTRODUCING TACL— A PROPOSAL FOR A NEW STANDARD T&E CONSTRAINT LANGUAGE

Abstract

It is expected that XML-based languages for configuring telemetry systems like MDL and TMATS will eventually replace their non-XML predecessors. However, despite its numerous benefits, XML does not solve all the related problems. In particular, it cannot harness the complexity of constraints that may pertain to vendor hardware or to express system-level constraints that span across entire networks of devices. In this paper, we present TACL, a T&E extension to W3C Shape Constraints Language (SHACL) for formulating constraints on configurations represented in MDL and TMATS, independently of any configuration software. TACL introduces high-level components that help to form constraints close to the user’s intent and are less concerned with the low-level syntax details. It exhibits much better resilience to changes in the XML schemas than the languages that refer directly to the XML trees. A proof of concept TACL engine has been successfully developed and applied to MDL/TACL configurations.