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= What is ISO 15926? =

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== Short Answer ==

ISO 15926 is a standard for representing information in a neutral form so that it can be used in any application, and so become truly interoperable.

== ISO 15926 is Based on a Counterintuitive Idea ==

In the ''Introduction to ISO 15926'' we often use the phrase "Your computer can talk to my computer and we don't have to know anything about each other's system beforehand."

[[Image(ISO15926Primer_04_WhatIs_a.jpg, 400px)]]

This sounds magical.  You are to be excused if you are "somewhat skeptical".

Currently, when we attempt to exchange information directly between two computer systems, we like to know as much as possible about the each system.  Using traditional methods, we have to examine the system on each end of the exchange to ensure that we know the meaning of each database term.  As well, we are looking for fortunate idiosyncrasies that we can exploit to somehow make the exchange faster or better.  We think we are being smart.

Well, we probably are being smart, but this approach locks us forever to the two particular software systems on each end of the exchange, and in fact locks us to particular ''versions'' of the software on each end of the exchange.

But if we have a more generic approach that does not depend on these idiosyncrasies, we can use our method of information exchange on more platforms.  And as we adopt more and more industry standard ways of representing information, we depend less and less on the software at each end point. We find that the less we know about each other's systems, the more reliable will be our exchange.  The logical conclusion, then, is the magical sounding phrase we started with.

[[Image(ISO15926Primer_04_WhatIs_b.jpg, 400px)]]


== Next ==
 * [wiki:ISO15926Primer_Supposed_To How Information Exchange is Supposed to Work]

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