Good find Jim, One thing we can look at from these guys is their handling of bit-packed fields. I've kind of been hand-waving the whole bit-level thing recently as less important than "hard issues" of compositionality and layering, but we do have to face this issue eventually. Other than that, from my skim I don't see how we don't end up just subsuming what they do. I expect there's quite a few efforts out there to add some sort of dense-packed format description capability to XML. Until DFDL really "comes out" I think we'll see more and more of this. In some sense this bodes well for the eventual success of DFDL. In every case I suggest we reach out to them to be sure they are aware of the DFDL effort, and then they can decide to contribute or not, but at least they won't be working in a vaccum. At some point we'll badly need poeple to review specs and consider if DFDL meets their needs. ...mikeb _____ From: Myers, James D [mailto:jim.myers@pnl.gov] Sent: Tuesday, November 23, 2004 10:39 AM To: dfdl-wg@gridforum.org Subject: [SPAM] RE: [dfdl-wg] BSDF I ran across another community working in the same space as DFDL: BSDL as part of MPEG21 (someone at the NARA conference mentioned it). From a quick look at what they have, it appears to be inverse DFDL with plans to make DFDL next, i.e. they go from model to output binary format, but not vice versa. Similar schema approach, etc. with some comments on things in schema that they don't allow. I haven't found a spec doc yet, just a paper and some presentations you can google for. Jim <http://www2002.org/CDROM/alternate/334/> Bitstream Syntax Description Language: Application of XML-Schema ... ... Language (BSDL) that embraces such XML bitstream descriptions. ... 2/; [13] IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point ... Final Draft Amendment 4: Streaming video profile ... www2002.org/CDROM/alternate/334/