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Is There an Open Standard for Network Maps?

Posted by Cliff on from the image-files-or-markup-langages dept.

mattski asks: "I am currently working on a project that generates network maps within a GUI, running on Solaris, which then needs to be exported somehow. What would you want to see as an export format for network maps and why? Take into account that the user must be able to manipulate the 'map' after it has been exported. I guess some options include XML or maybe even VRML but have you got any other thoughts?"

1 of 12 comments (clear)

  1. network maps by seifried · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well there are programs like visio which will do discovery and generate pretty maps, but they use strange formats. XML is a good candidate, you could define various network objects like hosts and links and then have a parser tie them together. Of course things may get "messy" if you have a complicated diagram, rendering it based on XML data could be difficult, whereas simply defining a picture looks nicer. The advantage of XML defined data is that automatically generating it would be relatively simple (feed in multiple traceroutes for example).