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January/February 2006 Newsletter
From the Executive Director
We are well into 2006 and we have hardly been able to catch our breath, last year we signed an agreement with ANSI and we are expecting to sign a similar agreement with ASTM this month. These agreements allow us to add ISO, IEC and ASTM terminology to the NATO terminology already included in the eOTD and as a result the eOTD is set to become the world’s most complete dictionaries of technical terminology. The eOTD will provide links to the underlying standards from where the terminology was extracted and will assign a unique eOTD concept identifier so that the concept can be used to create standardized encoded catalog descriptions.
The eOTD management procedures are the foundation of ISO 22745 and set the standard for open technical dictionaries including a requirement that concept identifiers are put in the public domain and that the identifiers are always freely resolvable over the Internet. This is an important step in ensuring that you always retain ownership and control over your encoded data.
Providing cross links between terminologies and classifications is a vital function of the eOTD. For anyone that has experienced the pain of assigning or updating UNSPSC codes the eOTD makes this job easier and more accurate. We will be upgrading the eOTD searcher and web services interface to allow ECCMA members to exploit this feature directly in their software applications by providing a link from the eOTD to all versions of the UNSPSC as well as to other commonly used classifications.
As ISO 22745 is well on its way through the ISO process we have started work on ISO 8000. This is a very exciting standard and I expect to see ISO 8000 available as an implementation draft in June of this year.
In 2005 we focused on improving the eOTD; in 2006 we will be focusing our efforts on supporting eOTD implementations and in particular members who are building eOTD Identification Guides as Cataloging Templates.
It is always important to remind ourselves that ECCMA’s mission is to provide the support necessary for its members to develop, maintain, and above all else, to implement standards for cataloging and in this respect we appear to be making significant progress. An ever increasing number of companies are downloading information related to the eOTD and hits on our website now exceed over 4,600 unique visitors per week. The challenge before us however is to ensure that there is a consistent implementation of the eOTD and this is best achieved by building ECCMA membership.
You can greatly assist us with this effort by educating others through presentations and articles as well as issuing joint press releases; of course nothing works better than simply asking your trading partners to join ECCMA.
Respectfully submitted,
Peter Benson
Executive Director, ECCMA
ISO 8000
Peter Benson, ECCMA
“The value of information is dependent on, its relevance (fit for the purpose), its currency (timeliness), its accuracy and its accessibility (ease of use). This standard recognizes that there is a need to allow the intended recipient of information the ability to define their data requirements in terms of the standards to be used for data encoding (syntax and semantic encoding), for defining completeness, for the assurance of accuracy (representations, certifications, and warranties) and for third party validation of accuracy.
While compliance with encoding and completeness can be validated programmatically, assertions of grades of accuracy are typically covered through authoritative representations, certifications and warranties that can be validated by third party audit.”
It is a great privilege to be the project leader for ISO 8000 but it is also a daunting responsibility. Interest in ISO 8000 is growing before our very eyes and it is going to be a challenge to manage expectations. ECCMA has built its reputation not only on the innovation and quality of its work but also on its dedication to open public standards. While ISO 22745 is going a long way towards ensuring that those that wish to claim to manage Open Technical Dictionaries must agree to put their identifiers in the public domain and agree to provide a free web services interface for resolution of the identifiers; in ISO 8000 we are committed to creating a viable standard for information quality that will be easy and low cost to implement. I believe that we will see the development of competitive ISO 8000 certification services with an emphasis on providing value added services that will play a major part in promoting the creation of standardized catalogs.
As you can see from the draft logo ISO 8000 is expected to allow an information provider (manufacture or supplier) to “certify” the quality of the information they are distributing using four indicators of information quality:
- The first and mandatory indicator defines the data encoding. Under ISO 8000 both the syntax and semantic encoding must be specified and freely resolvable. In this example the text eOTD will be hyperlinked to the eOTDr-XML schema or xsd which includes links to the eOTD.
- The second indicator is optional and allows the originator of the data to certify that the data is complete as defined by a published Identification Guide. In this example the AC/135 text will be hyperlinked to the location of the AC/135 Identification Guide in the ECCMA Identification Guide Registry. We are working with DLIS and the NATO AC/135 committee to convert the Federal/NATO Item Identification Guides to the eOTDi-XML format and these will be published in the ECCMA Identification Guide Registry. Any member of ECCMA can create and register identification guides and we are in the final stages of testing an on-line Identification Guide editor for this purpose. These guides are designed to be used in desktop and on-line cataloging applications as cataloging templates.
- The third indicator is optional and allows the originator of the data to certify the level of maturity of their internal processes and procedures that ensure the accuracy of the information they are distributing.
- The forth indicator is reserved for third party certification of the level of maturity of the internal processes and procedures that ensure the accuracy of the information being distributed under the ISO 8000 certification program. In this example the International Society of Logistics.
From the perspective of ECCMA’s members, the primary goal is to promote the creation of standardized catalogs; catalogs that are either in eOTDr-XML encoded to the eOTD or can be easily converted to eOTDr-XML. ISO 8000 certification will provide a means for buyers to easily ask for a defined quality of data and for suppliers to certify that they can comply with that request.
Successful implementation of ISO 8000 is expected to lead to improved data integration and reduce the cost of converting catalog data from one system to another. I fully expect to see the first ISO 8000 compliant catalogs to be posted to suppliers’ web site as early as June this year and to see the data being accessed by search engines and procurement applications.
We are not there yet but we are making significant progress in developing the fundamental infrastructure of the enabling technology that will play an important part in the semantic web.
ISO 22745
Gerry Radack, CTC
ISO 22745, Open Technical Dictionary, is being standardized through ISO Technical Committee 184 (TC184), Subcommittee 4 (SC4), Industrial data.
The last meeting of the committee was held in Hangzhou, China. At the meeting, SC4 assigned the 22745 project to working group 12 (WG12), Common Resources.
Following the Hangzhou meeting, an exploder and team site were established under SC4ONLINE, the official Web site of SC4.
Since the Hangzhou meeting, the ISO 22745 team held four teleconferences, at which much progress was made.
The team agreed that the scope of 22745 is to provide a standard for the maintenance of Open Technical Dictionaries in general and not a single Dictionary. Although each OTD would be maintained by a registration authority as defined in ISO/IEC 11179-3 ("an Organization responsible for maintaining a register"), these groups would be Standards Development Organizations recognized by international or national bodies or industry associations. To avoid confusion, the term "registration authority" was replaced by "dictionary maintenance organization (DMO)" within ISO 22745.
According to the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 1: "The technical management board (TMB) designates registration authorities in connection with International Standards on the proposal of the technical committee concerned." This process is potentially time-consuming, and there was a concern that the TMB would be overwhelmed with a large number of proposals for RAs coming out of SC4. In addition to OTDs, there are a number of other initiatives with SC4 to develop dictionaries, part libraries, and reference data libraries, all of which would need RAs. Howard Mason, Chair of SC4, suggested that rather than for SC4 to submit a slew of applications for DMOs to become ISO-recognized RAs, it would be better for the TMB to delegate to a single group within SC4 the power to recognize dictionaries being developed within SC4. This is currently being pursued within the context of the SC4 Ad Hoc Group on Procedures for an SC4 Maintenance Agency. A new Part 50 was proposed to contain the procedures that the group would follow specifically to maintain a list of ISO 22745-compliant OTDs.
The team agreed that an OTD would contain only terminology submitted by consensus organizations. Since each consensus organization would already have its own process for standardizing terminology, there is no longer a need to maintain a group of experts to review and comment on terminology submitted to the OTD. There will be a validation committee, but its chief purpose is to resolve disputes as to whether terms and definitions submitted by different consensus organizations represent the same or different concepts.
Since the team agreed that ISO 22745 provides guidelines for multiple OTDs, it no longer seemed appropriate for ISO 22745 to standardize the content of a single OTD. Therefore, Part 100 was dropped from the list of planned parts.
As a result of these changes, the following is the current list of planned parts for ISO 22745:
Part 1: Overview
Part 10: Dictionary representation
Part 11: Guidelines for the formulation of cataloging terminology
Part 13: Identification of concepts and terminology
Part 14: Dictionary query interface
Part 20: Procedures for the maintenance of an Open Technical Dictionary
Part 30: Identification guide representation
Part 40: Catalogue representation
Part 50: Structure and operation of the Registration Authority
Part 200: Implementation guide for incorporating cataloguing information into ISO 10303 product data
Parts 1, 11, 13 and 20 are currently being updated to satisfy comments from the WG12 convener. It is hoped that they will be out for ISO Committee Draft Technical Specification (CD-TS) ballot within the next few weeks. For a copy of the current drafts, please contact me (radack@ctc.com). Under ISO rules, the ballot will be voted on by national standards bodies that are participating members (P-members) of SC4, with one vote per country. The SC4 P-member countries are:
Australia, Austria, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States.
Readers from the above countries who are interested in providing input to the national review of Parts 1, 11, 13 and 20 are asked to contact me and I will put them in contact with the appropriate persons in their country.
Since parts 30, 40 and 50 were not within the scope of the original ISO 22745 New Work Item proposal, in accordance with the SC4 Handbook, they must be reviewed by the SC4 Change Management Team before they can go out for ballot. This review will take place at the ISO TC184/SC4 meeting to take place in Vico Equense, Italy, March 5-10, 2006. Following the Change Management review, the 22745 team will meet in Vico Equense with members of the SC4 community to progress the standard and address any issues that are raised.
In the upcoming months, the team will work to completing the remaining parts of ISO 22745 and preparing them for CD-TS ballot.
ECCMA India
Sheron Koshy, ECCMA India
ECCMA India is based in South East India in Vellore, Tamil Nadu. The Research and Development facility include eighteen staff divided into three departments. The largest department is responsible for the maintenance and release of the eOTD. This includes extracting terminology from standards, assigning concept identifiers and applying the ISO 22745 process to create links between concepts. This department is also responsible for managing translations as well as providing classification and coding support services for the ECCMA membership. The second department is responsible for maintaining the ECCMA point of contact database. This includes over 80,000 identified points of contact in electronic commerce as well as in standards development and is used to support the maintenance of the eOTD as well as other ECCMA research projects. The final department is the programming department and this department is responsible for managing the ECCMA web site and supporting the ECCMA research and development projects.
This month, we have seen a substantial eOTD update that includes seven different localizations as well as the addition of the first part of the ASTM terminology. The eOTD localizations now Czech, Polish, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Spanish, German and French.
ECCMA India is also responsible for the development of the member’s area of the web site and over the next two months we will be focusing on improving the eOTD classification tables to allow the eOTD to provide better crosswalks and multi version support. Using the eOTD class you will be able to look up a specific version of a classification as opposed to just the current version.
We are also working on enhancements to the eOTD searcher and completing the testing of the online Identification Guide Builder which can be used by members to build their own eOTD identification guides.
Sponsored Research and Development Projects
Peter Benson, ECCMA
At the end of last year we completed our contribution to the enhanced catalog builder project for the Department of Defense EMALL (TDICE II). This project was designed to test and prototype solutions for converting catalogs to standardized eOTD encoded catalogs in eOTDr-xml format. As part of this project we were able to develop and test a web services interface to the eOTD as well as explore the use of Identification Guides as cataloging templates. The project identified that while it is possible to provide an application for the conversion of existing catalogs to a standardized format this can not be an automated process. There will always be a need for an eOTD class to be assigned to each line item as only then can properties be accurately mapped. The project did however establish that it is indeed possible using a common spreadsheet as the preferred application to convert an existing catalog into an eOTD encoded catalog. One of the anticipated results of this project is a simple tool to convert a spreadsheet into the eOTDr-XML catalog format. As a result of this work we will also be creating a “Guide to Creating Standardized Catalogs” that outlines the process and procedures that should be followed to create eOTD encoded catalogs from a catalog in a spreadsheet format.
We have also completed the first part of the Smart STEP Codification (SSC) project. This project was sponsored by NATO committee AC/135 and looked into upgrading the Smart Codification project undertaken by the UK Ministry of Defense. The project focused on implementing the eOTD and also played an important part in the development of the eOTD Identification Guides as well as the development of the eOTD catalog format in XML. One of the more important outcomes of the project was the demonstration of the creation of an interface between B&G fasteners and Boeing that allowed B&G to extract data from their SAP system in a spreadsheet format and using the eOTD mapping to allow this data to be integrated into Boeing’s design system as a CAD parts library. Seeing the translation of a simple catalog in a spreadsheet format automatically converted to three dimensional objects was as close to miracle as I have ever seen. The key to this translation was of course a common mapping of the properties and I was glad to see that the eOTD was indeed able to facilitate this. NATO committee AC/135 is looking into a follow on project that will focus on evaluating the process in an operational environment and they have chosen to work with the Polish, Finnish and Spanish national codification bureaus. We will be participating and monitoring this project and in particular we are looking to develop a method to evaluate the cost and benefits of cataloging at source.
We have an ongoing project with NATO AC/135 to coordinate the creation of eOTD localizations. This is a fascinating project under which we are evaluating the funding and implementation of creating and maintaining eOTD localizations for Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese.
A new project that we have been asked to participate in is to test and prototype solutions for the conversion of the Federal Item Identification Guides into eOTD Identification Guides. This is a very important project as it will evaluate the feasibility of validating eOTD identification Guides against the existing Federal Logistics Information System (FLIS) as well as using eOTD Identification guides as FLIS cataloging templates. This will be one of the ultimate tests of the eOTD models and will create the framework for the conversion of the 1,500 Federal Identification guides into a format that will allow them to be used by industry as cataloging templates. Another outcome of this project is expected to be a final validation of the eOTD catalog format that will allow the conversion of NSN data to eOTDr-XML format and the ability of Government cataloguers to use eOTDr-XML as an import format for characteristic data.
Upcoming events
Peter Benson, ECCMA
Confirmed presentations and meetings:
March 2006
3rd: AngloGold Ashanti visit to ECCMA offices – Peter Benson & Dan King
5th-10th: ISO TC184/SC4 meeting in Vico, Equense, Italy – Peter Benson
8th: Contents Standards Council, Plano, Texas – Dan King
13th: ISO 22745 teleconference
15th: ISO TC154-UN/CEFACT forum Vancouver, Canada – Peter Benson
16th-17th: Newmont Mining briefing; Denver, Colorado – Peter Benson & Dan King
22nd: Interagency Committee on Standards Policy; Washington, D.C. – Peter Benson
17th-21st: ISO/IEC JTC1/SC32 & ISO TC37 Metadata registries Forum, Kobe, Japan – Dr. Gerry Radack
23rd-28th: ISO JTC1/SC32 , Kobe, Japan – Sheron Koshy
May 2006
16th: NATO Ac/135 eOTD workshop, Luxembourg – Peter Benson
6th Annual ECCMA International Cataloging Conference
We would like to remind everybody of the ECCMA annual conference that will be held at the Hotel Hershey on Wednesday October 25th and Thursday, October 26th 2006. We will be sharing the venue with the 50th ISO TC184 SC4 meeting that runs from Sunday through Friday. Taking advantage of this unique event we will be combining our Speaker dinner with the ISO TC 184 SC4 Awards dinner on Tuesday October 24th. We are planning to open our conference on Wednesday morning with a joint plenary session with SC4 followed by the traditional ECCMA Keynote panel presentation. After lunch we will open the exhibition hall where exhibitors will be demonstrating a wide array of cataloging solutions followed by a dinner and chocolate tasting. On Thursday we are planning a full day of twelve workshops in two simultaneous tracts.
If you wish to stay at the Hotel Hershey early reservations are highly recommended as it is expected to fill up early as there are over 100 ISO delegates that will be attending the ISO meeting. You may make reservations on line either by going to the link posted on our website or by going directly to the hotel website at www.hotelhershey.com. Also, you may call the hotel for reservations at 717-534-8668. We look forward to seeing everyone there.
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