An Introduction to ISO 15926 November 2011 - iRINGToday

absorbs the unconscious mental frequencies from this energy, more or less, as
food. Its excrement is a so-called telepathic matrix of conscious thought frequencies
combined with the nerve signals from the speech centers of the brain
which supplied them, which is picked up by the mind of the host. Basically, then,
if you stick a Babel fish in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said
to you in any language.
Bringing this metaphor into the field of plant design, ISO 15926 is similar to a Babel fish in that
it translates the descriptions of plant objects from one company’s database to that of another.
The important thing to note here is that the meaning of all the terms is maintained. You do not
have to rely on the context of the information to know what individual terms mean.
The metaphor of the Babel fish is a pretty good one, but there is a slight difference. The Babel
fish translates thoughts directly from Vogon into English in one operation. ISO 15926 will do
this in two steps using a middle, neutral layer. If you used ISO 15926 to translate Vogon to
English, it would first translate Vogon into intermediate standard descriptions and then from
these standard descriptions into English.
Using a middle layer of standard descriptions is an important step we will examine in more
detail, but briefly the middle layer is what makes it all work. Each organization’s “Babel fish”
(which we will call an ISO 15926 interface from now on) only has to understand these standard
descriptions, not the descriptions in the proprietary operations of every business partner.
ISO 15926 Is Like HTML
In case you don’t know what Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is, you can rest assured that
you are a part of a very large majority. HTML is the common language of the World Wide Web.
Every web page you have seen is written with some variant of it. If everyone involved in plant
design, construction, and operations were to use ISO 15926 to exchange information about
plant objects, we would have an equivalent to the HTML experience—but between machines.
For instance, if you want to look at the web page of a pump manufacturer you don’t need to
know anything beyond the web site address of the company. When your browser connects to
the web site, it assumes that what it finds will be encoded in HTML. Of course, it will be—if the
manufacturer wants to get any business through the web page—because HTML is the standard
format of the World Wide Web. In addition, it does not matter which browser you use.
Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Netscape are all written to understand HTML.
Imagine the hassle if you first had to contact the pump manufacturer and ask for the encoding
format, and then instruct your IT folks to write a translator program, before you could access
the web site? Of course, you would not do it. And of course the pump manufacturer would not
make a web page like this in the first place because no one else would do it either.
This metaphor does a good job of describing what the average user will have to know about
ISO 15926 as well. In the same way that most people who use the World Wide Web do not
need to know about HTML, most users of ISO 15926 will not have to know about it to exchange
information. When ISO 15926 is mature, it will simply be built into the software we will
all use. Engineers will be able to exchange information much more easily than they do now,
and very few of them will need to know that the standard exists.
On the other hand, many web sites today are actually written in HTML. This metaphor implies
INTRODUCTION
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