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.
