Upon publication the agreed format will be version 1.0. Any additional versioning will be agreed upon by all software developers, since all software will be required to handle the changes
All changes should be backwards compatible, unless a conversion tool is released.
resolution and unit
All geometry and values within the document use the pixel as the unit of measurement, with the assumption that they refer directly to some underlying image data.
The unit tag specifies what units the resolution tag converts to, with the resolution tag detailing the conversion rate between pixels and the unit. If possible, one of the standard units should be used.
last-modified
date and time stamp of the last modification of the rsml file
File-key provides a position for a text representation of this file. Use of this field is left to the user’s discretion, we recommend it is used as a unique identifier.
image
name (mandatory) specifies the file name of the image used to construct this root system. The name can be an absolute or relative url, or simply a file, but it should not be assume that this name refers to an existing file on a machine other than the original one.
captured (optional) is a dateTime value indicating the original time of capture for that image. It should be given in ISO8601 format
sha256 (optional) specifies the hash of the entire image file using the SHA-256 hashing algorithm. This file fingerprint represents a more reliable means to locate the original source image, for example if it was stored in a database. The hash is calculated over the entire image file, including any header, palette or encoding information. The hash is not calculated over only the pixel data, as implementations may differ once the file is loaded. If the image is altered in any way the hash will change, this is the expected consequence.
time-sequences
label is the name if the sequence the root system as part of. Other documents in the same sequence must have the same label.
index identifies the position in the sequence relative to all other images with that label. Indexes should be unique within a sequence, and in ascending order relative to time captured.
unified (optional) is a Boolean value indicating whether corresponding plant and root components share the same ids across files in the time sequence. As a Boolean value, unified can be recorded as <unified>true</unified> and <unified>false</unified>. In the absence of a unified tag, the default value of false is assigned.
property-definitions
It allows a given file to define the names and types of properties, using the property-definition subelement, and of functions, using the function-definition subelement, that are used in the scene.
Both should contain two elements: <name> and <type>. The type should preferably be chosen from the standard units.
An optional default element can be used to provide the value of the property to be used when a plant or root does not contain.
Software is not compelled to act on attributes found, they should be resaved.
The RSML Thesaurus provides a recommended list of pre-defined properties and functions. Software should handle and use these whenever possible, and define only new and distinct properties.
For example, the metadata tree at the top of this page defines a property called dead for plants and/or root that have a boolean value, such as: <dead>true</dead>, and a function diameter with real value.