Data blend: OAGIS collaborates with ISA, WBF Working Group

Research Triangle Park, NC — ISA has announced that OAGIS will build ISA-95 based Business Object Documents in collaboration with the ISA-95 Standards Committee on Enterprise-Control Integration and WBF’s XML Working Group. The goal of these documents is to ensure that no matter which standard a user implements, the standards interoperate.
According to David Connelly, CEO of the Open Applications Group, “We’ve been listening to customers’ needs for years, and the ISA-95 content is very important to all of the manufacturing end users I have spoken with. Our work to create these documents brings real solutions to the end user.”
The decision, which stems from a OpenO&M Initiative . The initiative is a venture of ISA, MIMOSA, OAGi, OPC, and WBF to support development of business process models for data exchange between manufacturing operations management and business support systems.
The Open Applications Group, a not-for-profit open standards development organization, is building a standard called Open Applications Group Integration Specification (OAGIS) to cover data exchange requirements for business systems and applications, including manufacturing and operations management systems. The Open Applications Group board of directors voted earlier this year to express the work of the ISA-95 Working Group in OAGIS, providing users an XML solution based on the popular standard.
“The documents that will come from our collaboration with ISA and WBF will be the industry guidelines that customers need,” said Gary Sullivan of iBASEt. “Harmonizing standards is important work, and the industry will benefit from this ongoing collaboration.”
With the new initiative, ISA-95 remains the foundation for the documents, with OAGIS and B2MML sharing each other’s extensions and collaborating on the standards. OAGi and WBF will sign a Memorandum of Understanding; ISA and WBF will be invited to join the OAGi Partner Council when it is formed, and OAGi will have a representative on the ISA-95 committee.
“ISA95 has contributed significant data exchange content and models supporting the manufacturing industry,” said ISA director of Standards Services T.S. “Chip” Lee. “Since our standard has historically been used in process manufacturing, and the OAGIS standard is typically used in discrete manufacturing, our collaboration enables the further development of both standards. WBF’s XML Working Group’s Business to Manufacturing Markup Language (B2MML) completes the package for the end user.”
WBF’s XMLWorking Group recently released V0400 of B2MML.The enhancements in this version of the documentation include support for ISA95 Part 5 transactions, OAGIS messages, and UN/CEFACT core components, while maintaining backward compatibility to V0300.
This February news item provides links to all the organizations and related articles, providing more background about its importance:

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