The fundamental task of an Electrical Ground Support Equipment (EGSE) used in the field of space exploration is to aid the testing and simulation of the spacecraft units in different phases of the development. To follow a flexible and modular approach in the development of EGSEs it is necessary to use a source code independent way to represent the simulation models and the description of logical operations. One of the possibilities to achieve platform independent data representation is the Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a meta-language derived from the Structured Generalized Markup Language (SGML) [1] and the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) [2] for creating special purpose Markup languages. The main advantages of the XML for our purposes are the following. XML languages represent data in a tree structure in text format so it is easy to design, and process by computers, and reasonably human-legible. There are a wide variety of tools to design and process XML files. The goal of this talk is to give a brief overview of three different projects. All of these projects are EGSE developments and use XML for implementing data representation layer to generate long test sequences. These developments are related to the ESA Venus Express mission, the ISS Obstanovka (plasma wave complex) instrument, and the ESA's Rosetta lander. For the first two projects the stored data is a test sequence, while at the third project the XML contains spacecraft unit model description for a simulation framework, which is a major tool for knowledge preservation in the long-term mission. The main part of the talk will present the experiences of the above projects then a detailed overview of a system witch utilize XML and corresponding technologies for implementing a data presentation layer will be given. This layer can be a fundamental module in a flexible and modular universal EGSE framework.
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