Goals

The primary goal of this project is to create a communication protocol / data format with the following characteristics, ordered by priority:

Universal - Capable of representation of any type of data, suitable for wide use including streaming, long-term storage and parallel accessing
Independent - Not tightly linked to a particular spoken language, product, company, processing architecture or programming language
Declarative - Self sufficient for data type definition and with the ability to build data types by combining existing ones
Normative - Providing reference form for data representation
Flexible - Support for data transformations, compatibility and extensibility handling
Efficient - Effective data compacting / compression support for plain binary and structured data

Protocol Design

Protocol design should cover following areas:

Data structure - How to store/stream data
Data types - Declaration of data types and build-in types
Data transformations - Support for data transformations, like compression, encryption and so on

Free and open source prototype implementation in Java is currently underway. It should provide following outputs:

Basic library - Library providing support for handling data encoded in the protocol itself
Catalog of types - Catalog service providing access to declaration of types
Framework - Local service providing various functions for applications
Editor tool - Basic tool for viewing and edition
Sample applications and files - Applications and files for demonstration purposes

You can learn more about this project by reading following sections: