The standard metadata document for GNSS – defined software is published in NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of Navigation Spring Edition 2021, Volume 68, No. 1, pp. 11-20.
The metadata standard is the product of a three-year effort by the ION GNSS SDR Standard Working Group and defines parameters and a scheme for expressing the contents of SDR sample data files. The standard promotes the interoperability of GNSS SDR data collection systems and processors.
In the last few years, the proliferation of software-defined radio (SDR) data acquisition systems and processing platforms designed or applicable for satellite navigation applications has been growing. These systems necessarily produce data sets in a wide range of different formats.
In order to correctly interpret this SDR data, basic information such as the form of the packaged sample and the sampling frequency are required. The communication of this metadata between creators and users has in the past been an ad hoc, cumbersome and error-prone process.
To address this issue, the satnav SDR community has developed a standard and regulatory metadata library to automate the process, thus simplifying the exchange of datasets and promoting the interoperability of satnav SDR systems.
The standard was ratified and formally adopted as the Navigation Standard Institute in January.
The official citation of the export document is here.
Illustration of ad-hoc metadata exchange between SDR data creators and users. (Image: NAVIGATION)