| 10 | | Interoperability of digital information became an issue almost as soon as computers made their way into engineering offices. Many organizations from around the world have been working on this topic for many years, from Owner/Operators, Constructors, Consulting Engineers, and Software Developers. Many standards organizations world wide are involved, some having been created just for this purpose. |
| | 10 | Exchanging information between two well-known applications is relatively simple because when we know exactly what all the data values on both sides of the represent it is easy to map them together. But when we move toward vision of ISO 15926 where anything-can-talk-to-anything worldwide, we can no longer count on knowing anything at all about the software on the other side of the transaction. |
| | 11 | |
| | 12 | In order to transmit information reliably to a random receiver, we must have a common method of classifying things. This is the study of Taxonomy and Ontology. |
| | 13 | |
| | 14 | ISO 15926 classifies plant objects using an open, extensible Ontology. |
| 66 | | Markup languages have a long history in enabling computers to handle large bodies of text properly, without human intervention. When encoded with a markup language, the ''content'' of a body of text is separated from the ''format'', or appearance of the text. This is an important concept in ISO 15926 where the goal is to embed enough ''context'' into the ''content'' that we do not need to see the format, or appearance, of the information to know what it means. |
| | 70 | The amount of information that is available on the Internet is truly staggering. Unfortunately, most of it is junk. Worse, much of what isn't junk is not stored in locations that are intuitive to all Internet users. And because the information is not presented in a uniform manner, understanding whether a given piece of information is worthwhile or not usually requires a human being to sift through it page-by-page. |
| | 71 | |
| | 72 | The vision of the Semantic Web is that human users will be able to launch intelligent agents to sift through this huge mass of data on their own and report back when they find something. But to enable this we need a way of describing information in a manner that embeds some of the context humans use to understand things. |
| | 73 | |
| | 74 | ISO 15926 leverages the tools developed for the Semantic Web. |
