DFDL

DFDL

Data Format Description Language (DFDL, often pronounced daff-o-dil), published as an Open Grid Forum Proposed Recommendation in January 2011, is a modeling language for describing general text and binary data in a standard way. A DFDL model or schema allows any text or binary data to be read (or "parsed") from its native format and to be presented as an instance of an information set. The same DFDL schema also allows data to be taken from an instance of an information set and written out (or "serialized") to its native format.

DFDL is descriptive and not prescriptive. DFDL is not a data format, nor does it impose the use of any particular data format. Instead it provides a standard way of describing many different kinds of data format. This approach has several advantages. It allows an application author to design an appropriate data representation according to his requirements while describing it in a standard way which can be shared, enabling multiple programs to directly interchange the data.

DFDL achieves this by building upon the facilities of W3C XML Schema 1.0. A subset of XML Schema is used, enough to enable the modeling of non-XML data. The motivations for this approach are to avoid inventing a completely new schema language, and to make it easy to convert general text and binary data, via a DFDL information set, into a corresponding XML document.

Read more about DFDL:  History, Implementations, Example, Features