Version 22 (modified by gordonrachar, 14 years ago)

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Metaphor - ISO 15926 Is Like Esperanto on Your Cell Phone


If you and I were not close together but needed to talk about something, we might decide to use our cellular telephones. There is a great deal of complexity hidden from the view of the casual user. One of us could be in a digital roaming area while the other was in an analog area. One, or both, might be in a vehicle travelling at high speed down a highway moving from one cellular area to another very quickly. We could be on different continents. All this is handled automatically by the software and circuitry that makes up the cellular telephone network.

But none of this would do either of us any good if you spoke Mandarin and I spoke German.

To communicate with cell phones we would have to agree to speak the same language. If we were among the estimated one to two million speakers of Esperanto, we might choose that language.

To talk to you using Esperanto I would first translate the words and sentence structure from German to Esperanto. When you heard me speak, you would translate the words and sentence structure from Esperanto to Mandarin and (hopefully) understand what I said.

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In this metaphor ISO 15926 takes the place of Esperanto. ISO 15926 is a common "language" of exchanging plant information. It would not matter how either of us stored our plant information, at the interface, we would "translate" it to and from ISO 15926.

Similarities and Differences Between the Metaphor and ISO 15926

This is quite a good metaphor in that we each would each continue to think and work in our native language (me, German; you, Mandarin) but would encode/decode the message to the common language of Esperanto more-or-less on the fly. In ISO 15926, the act of encoding or decoding the message is work done by what we call a façade.

This is a good metaphor in another way as well. The complexity of managing the call is hidden from cell phone users. You and I can contact each other by simply as calling each other's cell phone number. You don't have to call a different number if I am away from my office. I don't have to use a different protocol if you have a digital phone or an analog phone. You don't have to know if I am at home or speeding down a freeway. The cellular network figures out where we are and directs our calls through the closest transmission tower.

Similarly, using ISO 15926, we all are spared the detail of matching proprietary object classes with public object classes. You don't need to know where an information-sharing partner is located, all you need is the URL of his façade.

A major difference is in what people will have to know about ISO 15926 in order to use it. This metaphor implies that users will have to know ISO 15926 almost as well as they know their native tongue. In fact most people will not even have to know how to spell ISO 15926, it will simply be built into whatever computer system they are using. To extend the cell phone metaphor, it will be as if an intelligent Esperanto translator is built into both cell phones. I would speak my native German into my phone and you would hear your native Mandarin in yours.

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