This is a planning / work breakdown page for driving the development of a well defined efficient data serialization format for VSS data.

Background:

Initial design thoughts:

(green star) Proposal: We should develop VSS data message descriptions in both Protobuf and AVRO.

Please note the difference between:

  1. Describing a VSS-formatted catalog of data in a new format, e.g. VSS(YAML)→JSON conversion that exists in vss-tools, or the VSS(YAML) → Protobuf converter.
  2. Describing the payload format to transfer values that have been measured, for VSS-defined data items.

We are here talking about 2), not 1).

VSS has a limited set of data types (numbers represented as integers of different bit size, floating point types, strings, etc.) so the serialization format of the data itself is likely trivial.  But since the scope of this work is to define useful payloads in protocol transfer, it includes more information than only the data value itself. Prominently, of course, value carrying messages almost always have a time stamp.  Agreeing on and implementing the message format is required, even if leveraging encoding technologies built into protobuf, AVRO, and similar.

A full background and the suggested definition of several message types is here:   Data serialization / value formats  (please provide input/improvements there, so that it can be the blueprint for the development described on this page.)