Fiatech’s “iRINGTools Interfacing Project” (IIP) is going to rename itself to the “ISO 15926 Information Patterns” (IIP) project. This name change is to reflect the shift of emphasis from iRINGTools “Data Layer” production to the more the widely used ISO 15926 Template Information Patterns (TIPs).
The project was established to provide the industry with open source interfacing modules for popular industry applications to enable data read and write with an ISO 15296 representation. The focus then was on software development and technology. The requirements activity in IIP focused on building consensus on common sets of requirements for information access or data exchange.
As the requirements, and their mappings to ISO 15926 Classes and Templates began to build, the team noticed certain sets of repeating patterns. The repeating nature of the patterns allowed the work to be accelerated. When new requirements were identified with similar semantics and were already mapped to specific patterns, these same patterns would simply be applied to the new requirements.
As the project progressed, more companies began to join the team and contribute requirements which strengthened the consensus of the mappings. In addition, the JORD ISO 15926 mapping methodology document, which was recently published, intersected with the same processes used by IIP to define the patterns. This further reinforced the strength and validity of the usage patterns.
In hindsight, many in the community took the longer way around ISO 15926 to get to what was essentially already known. The good news is we have arrived and we are going forward with stronger confidence in the mapping methodology.
As we headed into 2012, the project realized that the body of work and consensus that was evolving in the requirements team was becoming the “gold” of the project. The project continues to work toward the delivery of iRINGTools application specific Data Layers, such as SmartPlant P&ID and Bentley’s eB. These have become more of a specialty area within the project and very valuable and necessary — but it is being completely overshadowed by the IIP pattern work.
BTW, since the patterns are primarily defined by the choice and arrangement of ISO 15926 Part 7 Templates, the actual name of each pattern is called a “Template Information Patterns” or TIPs. So if you run into anyone talking about ISO 15926 TIPs, you now know that IIP is where they are coming from.
TIPs represent the consensus agreed to by participants in the IIP Requirements Team working sessions, of which there have been many. TIPS are independent of any specific application and cover a wide range of objects types and properties.
This project provides an abstraction layer for ISO 15926 Part 7, dramatically simplifying the process of mapping data and accelerating software integration. It empowers subject matter experts to define information templates and mappings in the context of real-world usage patterns. By delivering the ISO 15926 TIPs and free open source “data layers”, the IIP project is shortening the time and cost to implement a solution.
TIPs are documented in an Excel spreadsheet and the latest version can be obtained on the iRINGTools wiki. A new “TIP” application is in the works that will replace the use of Excel and provide an additional set of reference data that will make mapping systems to ISO 15926 Classes and Template a lot more easy.
From the master TIPs file, participants are developing specific mappings for work flow requirements and software application used for design, procurement, construction, and operations and maintenance. Pattern mappings are either under development or planned for the following requirement sets or applications.
This is good news. The IDS-ADI, and now JORD, Mapping Methodology has been capturing best practice in ISO15926 mapping for many years, with the language of templates and patterns evolving as the standard itself has evolved and matures.
The recent convergence in what you’re calling here as TIP’s (referred to as Template Signature Patterns or TSP’s in the current JORD Methodology) is significant in that it reinforces, with confidence as you say, that business domain experts can define what it is they need to say business-wise in re-usable patterns, without really needing any knowledge of the underlying model or templates actually used to instantiate the model.
This is the feature that makes wider ISO15926 deployment a scalable prospect, without the bottleneck of reliance on those few experts in the totally generic core model.