In case this announcement slipped by anyone......

This is the formal announcement that DFDL v1.0 Spec. is now a full "Recommendation" from the OGF.

That's the term OGF uses for full standards, i.e., that are no longer in "proposed" status.

The announcement to wg-all@ogf.org doesn't say it's a full recommendation. It just says "new document", but if you follow the link (https://www.ogf.org/ogf/doku.php/documents/documents) to the list of OGF documents, you see that GFD.240 is the top row, and has the 3 important little letters "REC" next to this document. Those indicate the status as a "RECommendation".

So v1.0 is official, done.

Congratulations and many thanks to all who have been contributing so much to making this happen for so long.

It's kind of hard to imagine that I have been working (off and on) on DFDL since 2001, so 20 years. Given that I turned 60 this year, that's 1/3 of my life and 1/2 of my career. My full time job became DFDL only in the 2011 time frame, but that's 10 years of full time (mostly) on DFDL or DFDL-related work.

Steve Hanson is the other co-chair of the DFDL Workgroup at OGF, working (off and on) on DFDL since 2004 with a full-time stretch from 2011 to 2015.

The contributors to this workgroup, along with the co-chairs assembled together the collective knowledge from many data integration systems and tools, and collective knowledge of a huge amount of data experience to synthesize the DFDL standard.

I believe to have real impact on the computing industry today, you have to have an open standard, long-term commercial commitment, commercial adoption/product, and an open-source implementation as well, along with enough time and attention to actually finish the work. OGF provided a patient forum for the open-standard to come to fruition. Being a small organization OGF was actually perfect for DFDL given the long time it took to complete the work. A larger standards body might have forced things to happen too fast, or the whole process might have been derailed by too many participants.  IBM provided the commercial support and the first production-ready implementation called IBM DFDL, used in several of its key products, and the US DoD funded several core contributors to work on what has become the Open Source Apache Daffodil implementation. All these implementations were hard to build, and took real time and effort from many engineers. They cover very different data formats that improved the standard by making sure it was far more comprehensive than prior-generation technologies.

The official PDF of the standard (er "Recommendation") is https://www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.240.pdf

Mike Beckerle
OGF DFDL Workgroup Co-Chair
Apache Daffodil PMC Chair
Owl Cyber Defense - Principal Engineer
Please note: Contributions to the DFDL Workgroup's email discussions are subject to the OGF Intellectual Property Policy



---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Greg Newby <gbnewby@petascale.org>
Date: Mon, Mar 1, 2021 at 9:48 AM
Subject: [wg-all] New document published for DFDL-WG, #240
To: All WG <wg-all@ogf.org>


Dear OGF community,

A new document has been published by OGF. All OGF documents may be found here:
  https://www.ogf.org/ogf/doku.php/documents/documents

This document was provided by the Data Format Description Language Working Group (DFDL-WG).

GFD-R-P.240: Data Format Description Language (DFDL) v.1.0 Specification
Authors: Michael J. Beckerle, Owl Cyber Defense/Tresys and Stephen M. Hanson, IBM

Abstract: This document provides a definition of a standard Data Format Description Language (DFDL). This language allows description of text, dense binary, and legacy data formats in a vendor-neutral declarative manner. DFDL is an extension to the XML Schema Description Language (XSD).

This document obsoletes GFD #207 and GFD #174.

  - Greg Newby OGF Standards Editor
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