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Metaphor - ISO 15926 Is Like Esperanto on Your Cell Phone

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Contents

  1. ISO 15925 is like Using Esperanto on Your Cell Phone
    1. Similarities and Differences Between the Metaphor and ISO 15926


ISO 15925 is like Using 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 German and I spoke Mandarin.

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

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, Mandarin; you, German) 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.

Another good analogy is that the complexity of managing the call is hidden. Contacting your friend is as simple as calling the cell phone number. You don't have to call a different number if he is away from his office. You don't have to use a different protocol if he has a digital phone or an analog phone. You don't have to know if he is at home or speeding down a freeway. The cellular network figures out where your friend is and directs the call through the closest transmission tower. Similarly, using ISO 15926, you are spared all 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.

Where the metaphor differs is that when human beings translate from their native language to Esperanto, they invariably filter the message through their subjective consciousness. This may result in an incorrectly phrased message. With ISO 15926 there is a single, internationally-agreed lexicon and syntax which makes the messages more reliable.


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