The "Generic Station Description?(GSD) up to version 5 allows describing the characteristics of PROFIBUS devices.
Since the PROFInet concept is enhanced to cover distributed IO also for PROFInet IO devices a description method is needed. Because the device model of PROFInet devices is based on the PROFIBUS model it makes sense to build one description method for both systems.
Because the changes of the device model for PROFInet are considerable it seems advisable to use a more powerful description method compared to the keyword based one.
It suggests itself to use XML as new language for the device description because XML implies many advantages:
- XML is an open standard for data description.
- XML has a high acceptance in the world of information technology
- new software technology is often based on XML.
- includes structural and contextual information
- XML parser are free available ?there is no need to build an own parser!
- XML schema technology allows a formal description of an XML document structure. It can be used to validate the structure of an XML file with standard tools.
- XML is Unicode based. Thus it is easy to support foreign languages.
- XML documents can be transferred into another format using standard tools (XSLT). This makes it easy for example to build HTML based documentation.
- There are many powerful XML editing tools available making it easier to compose an XML document.
As new name for the XML based decription of PROFIBUS and PROFInet Devices GSDML was defined. The acronym stands for Generic Station Description Markup Language.
This draft is published for testing and review. Comments have to be submitted to PROFIBUS Nutzerorganisation e.V. (PNO) until January 30th, 2004.
