The appropriateness of XML for diagnostic description

A standard for the self-description of fusion plasma diagnostics will be required in the near future. The motivation is to maintain and organize the information on all the components of a laboratory experiment, from the hardware to the access security, to save time and money. there is no existing standard to organize this kind of information, every EU Association stores and organizes each experiment in different ways. This can lead to severe problems when the particular organization schema is poorly documented. rdization is the key to solve these problems. From the commercial information on the diagnostic (component supplier; component price) to the hardware description (component specifications; drawings) to the operation of the equipment (finite state machines) through change control (who changed what and when) and internationalization (information at least in English and a local language). This problem will be met on the ITER project, for which a solution is essential. ng candidate solution is the Extensible Markup Language (XML). In this paper, a review of the current status of XML related technologies will be presented.