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 2013 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Ninth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 21-24, 2013 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / With the advent of networked based data acquisition systems comes the opportunity to acquire, transmit and store potentially very large volumes of data. Despite this, and the increased size of the data acquisition networks, the use of tightly integrated hardware, and setup and analysis software enable the FTI engineer to save time and increase productivity. This paper outlines how the use of innovative bus packetizer technology and the close integration of FTI software can simplify this process. The paper describes how packetizer technology is used to acquire data from avionics buses, and how it packages this data in a format that is optimized for network based systems. The paper further describes how software can simplify the process of configuring avionics bus monitors in addition to automating and optimizing the transport of data from various nodes in the acquisition network for transmission to either network recorders or via a telemetry link.