International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / As stated in IRIG 106-93/96/99/00, the purpose of the Telemetry Attributes Transfer Standard (TMATS) is; “... provides a common format for the transfer of information between the user and a test range or between ranges. This format will minimize the 'station unique' activities that are necessary to support any test item. In addition, it is intended to relieve the labor intensive process currently required to reformat the information by providing the information on computer compatible media, thus reducing errors and requiring less preparation time for test support.” However, it is well known that TMATS does not support “Instrumentation” data. Also, TMATS does not include many current data conversion formats, or have a way to easily include new formats as they are adopted. We believe that such changes will help TMATS reach its full potential and become more closely aligned with its stated objectives. It is the hope of the authors that this paper will generate support for IRIG to revise TMATS to include these important amendments.

ITC/USA 2010 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Sixth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 25-28, 2010 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / The complexity of modern test and evaluation (T&E) processes has resulted in an explosion of the quantity and diversity of metadata used to describe end-to-end T&E processes. Ideally, it would be possible to integrate metadata in such a way that disparate systems can seamlessly access the metadata and easily interoperate with other systems. Unfortunately, there are several barriers to achieving this goal: metadata is often designed for use with specific tools or specific purposes; metadata exists in a variety of formats (legacy, non-legacy, structured and unstructured metadata); and the same information is represented in multiple ways across different metadata formats.

ITC/USA 2009 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fifth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2009 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Weapons System Test and Integration Laboratory (WSTIL) at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground (YPG) will provide a new capability for ground based testing in this arena. Current and near term YPG scheduled test programs will benefit tremendously from this enhanced ground test capability provided by the Weapons STIL. The Weapons STIL's design goals center on the implementation of an automated mechanism for testing the weapon systems and sensors that are currently the responsibility of the YPG facility. To meet the Army's weapons test needs the Weapons STIL incorporates various levels of digital stimulation, human-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, and installed system test facility (ISTF) techniques to maximize ground testing in order to focus and optimize subsequent open air flight testing. This paper describes this work in progress.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / For the last 30 years Magnetic Tape Systems have been the primary means of recording data from airborne instrumentation systems. Increasing data rates and harsh environmental requirements have often exceeded the ability of tape-based systems to keep pace with platform technology. This paper examines operational and data reduction benefits when employing the IRIG 106 Chapter 10 Solid State Recorder Standard introduced by the Range Commanders Council (RCC) Telemetry Group (TG). The Standard and this paper address media formatting, data formatting for a variety of different data types, data downloading, and data security, along with serial command and control and discrete command and control of the recorder. This paper also addresses software data processing and raw data reconstruction of Chapter 10 data.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Previously, we have presented an approach to achieving standards-based multi-vendor hardware configuration using the Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) and an associated Application Programming Interface (API) specification. In this paper, we extend this approach to include support for configuring PCM formats. This capability is an appropriate fit for IHAL since changes to hardware settings can affect the current telemetry format and vice versa. We describe extensions made to the IHAL API in order to support this capability. Additionally, we show how complete instrumentation configurations can be described using an integrated IHAL and TMATS XML. Finally, we describe a demonstration of this capability implemented for data acquisition hardware produced by L-3 Telemetry East.

ITC/USA 2012 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Eighth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2012 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Previously, we have presented an approach to achieving standards-based multi-vendor hardware configuration using the Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) and an associated Application Programming Interface (API) specification. In this paper we describe the current status of the IHAL standard. Since the first introduction of IHAL at ITC 2006, the language has undergone a number of additions and improvements. Currently, IHAL is nearing the end of a 2-year standardization task with the Range Commanders Council Telemetry Group (RCC TG). This paper describes the standardization process in addition to providing an overview of the current state of IHAL. The standard consists of two key components: (1) the IHAL language, and (2), the IHAL API specification.

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / This paper describes a method in which users realize the benefits of a standards-based method for capturing and evaluating verification and validation (V&V) rules within and across metadata instance documents. The method uses a natural language based syntax for the T&E metadata V&V rule set in order to abstract the highly technical rule languages to a domain-specific syntax. As a result, the domain expert can easily specify, validate and manage the specification and validation of the rules themselves. Our approach is very flexible in that under the hood, the method automatically translates rules to a host of target rule languages. We validated our method in a multi-vendor scenario involving Metadata Description Language (MDL) and Instrumentation Hardware Abstraction Language (IHAL) instance documents, user constraints, and domain constraints. The rules are captured in natural language, and used to perform V&V within a single metadata instance document and across multiple metadata instance documents.

ITC/USA 2014 Conference Proceedings / The Fiftieth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 20-23, 2014 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, CA / The paper discusses the history and background of metadata standards for the FTI community over the last 20 years and speculates on how they may develop in the future. It starts by highlighting the deficiencies of proprietary formats and the resulting problems. It then discusses the characteristics and features of specific industry standard metadata descriptions such as TMATS, iHAL, MDL and XidML in addition to their levels of maturity. The attributes of what constitutes a fully mature FTI metadata standard is then discussed. It is suggested that any standard must serve at least two functions, Configuration and Validation, and outlines what exactly each means. Finally, it is argued that there is now a significant level of convergence and consensus in both the scope and application of metadata, and in the associated concept of operations (ConOps). The details of this Concept of Operations are then discussed along with suggestions as to how this may evolve in the coming years.

ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / The Western Aeronautical Test Range (WATR) staff at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center is developing a translation software called Chapter 10 Tools in response to challenges posed by post-flight processing data files originating from various on-board digital recorders that follow the Range Commanders Council Inter-Range Instrumentation Group (IRIG) 106 Chapter 10 Digital Recording Standard but use differing interpretations of the Standard. The software will read the date files regardless of the vendor implementation of the source recorder, displaying data, identifying and correcting errors, and producing a data file that can be successfully processed post-flight.