An Introduction to ISO 15926 November 2011 - iRINGToday

CHAPTER 1:
WHY WE NEED ISO 15926
It is difficult to overestimate the value of being able to exchange information with anyone
without fear of transcription error, while maintaining the precise meanings of all terms, even
though you know nothing at all about your partner’s internal work processes and methods of
data storage. When information is transferred correctly, the quality and reliability of your end
product increases. When you know for sure that information will be transferred correctly, you
can move faster because you do not have to check for transcription errors.
A significant part of designing, building, and operating capital assets involves transferring and
accessing information about those assets. In its oft-cited 2004 report Cost Analysis of Inadequate
Interoperability in the U.S. Capital Facilities Industry, the National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) reported claims of some companies that 40 percent of engineering
time was spent finding and verifying information. Overall, the study showed that the lack of
interoperability among computer-aided design (CAD), engineering, and other software systems
costs the American capital projects industry more than $15 billion every year. 1
ISO 15926 makes exchanging information between applications easier in two ways. First, when
your information exchanges go beyond manually rekeying data or using point-to-point custom
mapping (which we discuss shortly) you need to create some type of data dictionary containing
definitions of all objects in your facility—along with their attributes. If your organization is
sufficiently large, this requires a significant effort. Instead of developing your own dictionary,
ISO 15926 offers a dictionary 2 that you can use free of charge. Because the ISO 15926 dictionary
has been developed by a great number of people from many industries in many parts of
the world, there is a high probability that the definitions you need are already there.
Second, when we exchange information today we need people to manage the transactions
because we mistakenly assume a consistently applied background of rules and jargon of the
trade. We call these background rules “context,” and without context we are lost. We need to
be able to apply these rules consistently in order to correctly match terminology in a universe
of very similar terms.
If we use the full specification of ISO 15926, we can make information exchanges easier by
essentially building the context of the information into the information itself. When we model
the information, we can capture the precise meaning of each term and embed it with the
term. This makes it easier for machines to talk directly to each other because implied meanings
that participants are “just expected to know” are eliminated (or at least minimized).
These two issues are intertwined. To fully understand the value of simply being able to use an
existing data dictionary, instead of having to develop one from scratch, we will first discuss
the sources of information exchange costs. This will leads to a discussion of “context” and
1. The report is available online. Search for “Cost Analysis of Inadequate Interoperability in the U.S.
Capital Facilities Industry.”
2. Truth in advertising: Data exchange in the manner envisioned by ISO 15926 requires more than just
a dictionary. We are simply starting with a description of how the dictionary component works as a
way of easing into the topic.
CHAPTER 1
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