I'm just letting the working group know that we are
submitting an 

abstract today to give a presentation on DFDL at the NIST Data Science

Symposium. Below is what we plan to submit.

- Steve

----------------------------------------------

Title: Stop Writing Custom Data Parsers -- Write DFDL Instead!

This talk gives an introduction to the Data Format Description

Language (DFDL), how it can be used to parse both textual and binary

data in a standardized way, and how this leads to less time spent on

custom data parser development and consequently, more time spent on

data processing and analysis. The talk will then describe the

current DFDL implementations, with focus on the open-source Daffodil

project and its design. It will conclude with a brief walkthrough of

real DFDL examples, including commercial and scientific formats, and

a demonstration of the parsing capabilities of Daffodil.

The DFDL specification, which has completed a second round of public

comments as part of the Open Grid Forum (OGF), is a modeling

language for describing general text and binary data using a subset

of XML Schema augmented with data format annotations. DFDL allows

data to be read from its native format and presented as an instance

of an information set or an XML document. DFDL also allows the

reverse, through conversion of an information set back to its native

format. By using the information set, this cleanly integrates with

common XML utilities (e.g. XProc, XSLT, XQuery) for data processing

and analysis regardless of the format of the native data.

Two implementations of DFDL exist, as is required by the OGF to

become a standard. The first, created by IBM and already shipped in several
IBM

products (such as IBM Integration Bus v9), is written in both Java and
C 
and includes graphical tools for modeling, running,
and debugging DFDL schemas. 
The second implementation, Daffodil, is an open-source
project written in

Scala, with a design focused on speed and correctness. With the two

implementations making great strides, and the DFDL specification

nearing standardization, DFDL is becoming a promising tool that will

ease data parsing, processing, and analysis.

Biography:

Stephen Lawrence has worked as a software engineer at Tresys

Technology since 2007, while contributing to the open-source

Daffodil project as a core maintainer for almost two years. He works

alongside Michael Beckerle, the co-chair of the DFDL Working Group,

to develop Daffodil and improve the DFDL specification. Outside of

Daffodil, he focuses on computer security applications, including

file inspection and sanitization, Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux),

and cross domain solutions.

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