CPACS is designed to serve as a central data exchange format in fully automated process chains. A key requirement is therefore that tools can automatically read and process an incoming CPACS file. A second requirement is that users can interpret the data set. To address both requirements, the following usage of the <name> and <description> elements in combination with the uID attribute is proposed:
name: A specification of the <name> element is usually mandatory for sequences of elements (e.g., if max occurrence is unbounded [1..*]). Typical examples are wings/wing, aeroPerformance/aeroMap or missions/mission. Such elements must be able to be listed by tools, especially for visualization and reporting purposes, where the <name> element serves as a concise and human-readable indicator of the actual meaning of the corresponding element in the list (e.g., which wing, which aeroMap, which mission). This is usually a single word or a small number of words.
description: The <description> element is usually optional and is used to add comprehensive and human-readable explanations. This is usually at least one explanatory sentence.
uID: As described in more detail in Section 6, the uID attribute is mainly used for internal referencing of CPACS elements. Further processing software, e.g. TiXI and TiGL, also use the uIDs to improve the robustness of the data query. Consequently, the uID attribute serves as a machine-readable indicator and does not claim to be interpretable by human users. In some practical use cases, the same string is chosen for uID and <name>. However, restrictions on the choice of characters for the uID attribute must be considered, for example that no spaces may be used and the uID must be unique.
<wing uID="main_wing">
<name>Main wing</name>
<description>This is the main wing which was designed by my awesome wing sizing design tool. Your tool should not try to read and interpret what I'm writing here as typos are not recognized by XML processors.</description>
</wing>