The CANopen Markup Language representing fieldbus data with XML

This paper presents the CANopen Markup Language (CoML). CoML is an XML application developed to represent controller area network (CAN) fieldbus system and process data in a generic and platform independent manner. Due to the intrinsic interchangeability of XML structured data, fieldbus data becomes accessible not only by dedicated CoML tools but also by a wide variety of common general purpose XML tools like XML editors or XML databases. Since XML documents are especially well suited to be deployed on the WWW, this approach also facilitates the convenient use of CoML information in a distributed client/server architecture. CoML documents are used to describe CAN device interfaces and CAN system information, to hold CAN process data, and to configure monitoring attributes and (remote) access privileges at the finest granularity. This paper also outlines some practical uses of CoML for fieldbus monitoring and remote fieldbus management.