Groups Join Forces for Maintenance Spec

The Instrumentation Systems and Automation Society (ISA, www.isa.org), the Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance (MIMOSA, www.mimosa.org) and OPC Foundation (for OLE for Process Control, www.opcfoundation.org) have announced a collaboration effort to develop interoperable open solutions spanning from the factory floor through the enterprise.

Gary Mintchell

Dec. 1, 2003

The three organizations have agreed to establish a Joint Working Group to determine how to co ordinate their various standards development efforts. The objective is to simplify the development of interoperable Operations & Maintenance (O&M) systems, equipment and software.

Interoperable

Responding to new developments in Web Services technology and Microsoft .Net, the OPC Foundation underlined its aim to transition its specifications away from traditional “component”-based connectivity toward a unified architecture through the use of vendor products that will be interoperable with full internet connectivity and scalability across platforms of the end-users’ choice. For example, the OPC XML DA (eXtensible Markup Language for data access) specification breaks the tradition of COM/DCOM (for Component Object Model/Distributed COM) communications on which OPC has relied since its beginnings in 1997.

Web Services and XML remove the limitation for data and information to be isolated behind a corporate firewall, therefore opening up cross-platform connectivity over the Internet.