Converting Recorded RDS-TMC Services into XML to Simplify Following Quality Assessment

RDS-TMC is a technology for distributing traffic information over the air. Despite its age, its popularity is still growing and is in many countries being freshly implemented. Because the way the information is encoded into RDS data is complex, it is quite difficult to objectively test and evaluate any RDS-TMC service; many times the evaluation simply states "it works" or "it does not work" on some particular device. This paper describes our approach to the conversion of raw RDS data into XML, which is much easier to understand and evaluate. We describe the format of XML and also mention possible technologies and tools which could help evaluating the information stored in these files, like XQuery, BaseX, etc. The described solution was used in real-life tests of three services: country-wide service in Czech Republic, regional service in Prague and pilot testing in Poland.