Last month we reviewed a pre-publication edition (the ‘Primer’) of Fiatech’s Introduction to ISO 15926 to conclude that it was heavy on business benefits and light on technology. The final version, the Introduction, goes some way to rectify this and is a considerable improvement.
While not exactly guff-free, the Introduction embeds much more hard information in the narrative. The section on the history of ISO 15926 is greatly enhanced and has expanded into a detailed and authoritative history of plant information standards around the world. The section ‘How does it work’ is improved but just as you think you are getting into the technicalities, it flip flops back into metaphor explaining stuff that is more or less self evident.
The ‘Getting started’ section is more or less unchanged. ‘Detailed implementation’ remains beyond the scope of the Introduction. In our opinion, much of the space taken by analogy, metaphor and business case could have been used to provide a blow by blow account of something like the iRing experiment with instructions on how to code your own Facade. The question remains, is there a compelling case for ISO 15926 as the silver bullet for interoperability? The Introduction repeats the brave claim that the protocol permits information exchange ‘without knowledge of each others systems.’ This should perhaps read, ‘if the other systems comply with ISO 15926’ which is a different proposition altogether. Download the Introduction from www.oilit.com/links/1111_40.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.