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Opportunities for Personal Involvement With ISO 15926


Contents

  1. Abstract
  2. Likely Roles for Team Members
    1. Most Important Role
    2. An Example
  3. Where to Start
    1. Ideas for Self Study
  4. Next

Abstract

If you want to get involved with ISO 15926, the ideal situation is that you work for an organization that wishes to implement the standard. But even if you do not work for such an organization there are still opportunities to learn more. For instance, your organization may wish to implement ISO 15926 in the future and you wish to prepare yourself to take a significant role.


Likely Roles for Team Members

There are a number of roles on an ISO 15926 implementation team that need to be filled, depending on which part is being implemented. For instance, to implement ISO 15926 at the dictionary compliance level, only the first three roles, below, would be needed. As you will see, none of these three require very much ISO 15926-specific knowledge. As you your organization increases its implementation of ISO 15926, more roles will be required.

Application Expert

This person needs to know all of your software applications generally, and in particular how to get information into them and out of them.

If your organization has a large base of custom software, one of your developers would be a good candidate. If your organization primarily uses commercial software, an administrator for one of those systems would be a good choice.

Subject Matter Expert

This is the person who knows what your business does. He will work primarily as a resource for the Information Modeler to give context to all the terminology and plant objects. For instance, the word pressure will show up in many places. The Subject Matter Expert will have to know all the subtle differences.

If your organization is a refinery or petrochemical plant, a good candidate would be a process engineer, or someone who knows a great deal about all of the chemical and physical processes, and all of the equipment. If your organization is an EPC, a good candidate would be a computer-literate Project Engineer who is familiar with all of your work processes, and has an understanding of all engineering disciplines.

This person will end up being a user of ISO 15926 to do production work, for example, creating forms or spreadsheets that collect and share data. It would be good to learn about ISO 15926 Templates to a basic level, and how to use the RDS/WIP to look up classes.

Network and Database Expert

This person will create the IT Infrastructure that the ISO 15926 components will use. This person will need to know how to set up web services, how to create a database, and will have to dissect the new iRING software published by the Camelot project. This role overlaps with Infrastructure Coder, below, which will be required if your organization publishes software. This role, Network and Database Expert is required for all implementations of ISO 15926.

An existing network administrator is an obvious candidate.

Shallow Information Modeler

This person will define terminology and relationships (templates) for others to use. A significant portion of day-to-day work will involve mapping, for instance, between ISO 15926 systems and non-ISO 15926 systems.

Design engineers with some formal information systems training, or software engineers with a strong interest in the end use of applications will be good choices.

Good training would be learning about ISO 15926 Templates to a basic level, how to use the RDS/WIP to look up classes, then go on to learn how to prepare submissions.

Deep Information Modeler

This person will define ISO 15926 data and definitions as baseline features in software.

Candidates will have a formal background in information systems analysis and predicate logic. Good candidates are those who have a strong background in information modeling and are comfortable with tools like Entity-Relationship Diagrams, Object Relationship Mapping, and Unified Modeling Language.

This person will need a thorough understanding of ISO 15926 Templates, a thorough understanding of Part 2, especially concepts like Temporal Whole-part modeling.

Infrastructure Coder

This person will support ISO 15926 data and definitions as baseline features in software. If your organization writes software that uses ISO 15926 to exchange data, this will be a high-profile position. If your organization does not write software, this position might not be required.

In addition to a formal background in information systems, candidates will need a strong understanding of RDF/OWL, and how to use SPARQL in order to extract information from RDS/WIP. Practical knowledge of Web Services, Software as a Service, Representational State Transfer, and the ability to dissect the new iRING software will be very useful.

This person will need a thorough understanding of ISO 15926 Templates and how they relate to RDF/OWL.

Most Important Role

Of these six roles, the most important is Subject Matter Expert. Mechanical engineers and process engineers who design or operate plants are good candidates. They are the people who know the difference between pressure and pressure. If you ask computer science grads, they will likely reply "Huh? Pressure is pressure." But if you ask plant engineers, they will likely reply "What kind of pressure and what kind of pressure?", which is the correct answer. If we trust all of the information modeling to computer science grads, we could end up misclassifying data.

An Example

Is pressure digital or analog?

To most people, including plant engineers, this is a silly question. Of course pressure is analog, because it is infinity variable from a full vacuum to more-or-less infinity. But when you zoom in to the atomic level, pressure is one molecule of a fluid impinging on one molecule of a container. Pressure is digital after all!

The sixty-four dollar question is "Who cares?" Plant engineers, in their normal day-to-day work, certainly don't care. But what if your organization employs scientists to do basic research? Do you think some of them might care? And if they do, don't you think that some engineering applications might want to exchange information with scientific applications? If so, you certainly don't want to treat all instances of "pressure" equally.

There are a number of large organizations that employ a great many engineers and a great many scientists. Your humble author, talking to one such organization, was told that it had over two hundred fifty software applications that had to exchange information. Of course all of the two hundred fifty don't have to exchange information with every one of the other two hundred forty-nine, but if you were to connect the appropriate applications together, they would make one contiguous network.

So when an organization implements ISO 15926, the most important people on the team will be those who know the meaning of all the data values.

Where to Start

The first step is to learn what ISO 15926 is, and the best way to do this is to read the Primer. (Well, actually, you're already reading it.) But in case you linked directly to this page, start at the beginning. Select the "Primer Introduction" link in the big green box in the upper right hand corner of this page.

It is important to understand that ISO 15926 is a fundamentally different approach to making machines able to talk to each other and convey meaning. In the past we've viewed machine-to-machine communication as a technology problem, building more powerful processors, or writing more artful code. But we ran into the wall of not knowing how to handle the information. ISO 15926 sidesteps the powerful chips and Machiavellian code and focuses on modeling information.

Ideas for Self Study

Information Modeling

The barrier to implementation of ISO 15926 is usually not technology. The basic technology used in ISO 15926 has already been developed for the Semantic Web. Usually the biggest barrier is modeling the information in a way that imbeds all the context that people fill in unconsciously.

Infrastructure Technology

XML is used in ISO 15926 as a transport language. This means that when an information transfer actually takes place, the message that moved is encoded in XML. Thus, it is helpful to at least know the concept behind XML so you can read the data transmission directly.

Links to Information Modeling and XML are on the Other Resources page of this Primer.

Next


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