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.