Experiences in standardization of tabular engineering data

摘要

The Flight Simulation Technologies Committee of AIAA is studying current standards of data structure within industry, preliminary to developing and recommending a standard for transfer of data between facilities within the flight simulation community. This paper describes the experiences of one engineering organization in its conversion from several diverse, user-inefficient, tabular data systems to a single, unified data handling system. The requirements in terms of the support utilities, user interface, ease of manipulation, and flexibility of application and adaptation are described. Attributes found essential to successful conversion are described, as are the software utilities which made the conversion possible. Examples of before-and-after data matrices are shown to illustrate the best and worst features of each. It is not the purpose of this paper to propose a specific tabular data system for universal application.