Fiatech JORD issues final report

Engineering reference data endpoint operational. Great cost and effort needed for sustainability.

The Fiatech standards organization has just published the Final Report from JORD, its ‘joint operational reference data’ project. JORD, a joint effort between Fiatech and Norway’s POSC/Caesar Association (PCA) began in 2011 with the intent of delivering a ‘scalable and sustainable’ reference data service (RDS) within 5 years. The Report heralds the end of JORD phase 2 which completed in August 2014. An optional Phase 3 is planned to start later this year.

JORD’s focus is the software tools that underpin major capital projects in engineering and construction. The idea is to provide developers and end users with quality-assured reference data using the ISO 15926 standard for information management in the process industries, in particular in its Semantic Web technology flavor.

The 15 page Report covers compliance with 15926, development tools, training and operations of V2.0 of the data endpoint. This provides ISO15926 compliant data as a Sparql endpoint, using Apache Fuseki to serve semantic RDF data over HTTP. The endpoint is now operational and serving data but its future development and maintenance will require substantial effort and resources.

The authors observe, ‘stakeholders are diverse and their needs conflict.’ ‘Very large amounts of reference data are required, the system will always be in development.’ ‘The cost of quality reference data […] is significant and not understood by all stakeholders.’ The report acknowledges contributions from DNV-GL and from TopQuadrant whose Composer was chosen as the RDL Expert Manager Tool. Overall JORD project costs are around $1.3 million for the first three years.

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