Imported from previous forum
[ original email was from Jim Northey - jnorthey@jandj.com ]
I think we should consider following the lead of the ISO/IEC standards that provide bitstreams for use in conformance testing.
The provision of an unencoded file a FAST encoded file and a template definition - that was orthogonal to the 1.0 release of FAST should be sufficient to serve as a conformance test.
How that file is created is less important than more than one implementation concurring on its accuracy.