Overview
ISO/TS 29002-20:2010, “Industrial automation systems and integration - Exchange of characteristic data - Part 20: Concept dictionary resolution services,” defines an interface to retrieve information from a concept dictionary used in industrial automation. The Technical Specification describes three sets of capabilities (called services) that enable semantic resolution and access to terminological and ontological information for concepts identified by international registration identifiers.
Key topics
- Concept dictionary resolution interface: Specifies how clients locate and query concept dictionaries on the Internet to support semantic interoperability.
- Location Service: Given a registration authority identifier, returns the Internet locations of Terminology and Ontology servers for that authority.
- Terminology Service: Enables searching for concepts, languages, and dictionary elements using keywords, search criteria, and expressions; and, given an IRDI (International Registration Data Identifier), retrieves terminological information.
- Ontology Service: Retrieves ontological information about a concept using the concept’s IRDI.
- IRDI reference: Uses the IRDI format defined in ISO/TS 29002-5 to reference registered concepts unambiguously.
- Interoperability focus: Aims to standardize how systems resolve and interpret characteristic data across heterogeneous engineering, asset-management, and automation tools.
Applications
ISO/TS 29002-20 is practical for anyone implementing semantic lookup and resolution in industrial automation and data-exchange scenarios:
- System integrators and automation engineers who need to map and exchange device and process characteristics across tools and vendors.
- Software vendors building configuration, asset-management, PLM, SCADA, or MES systems that require authoritative term and ontology lookups.
- Data modelers, ontology engineers, and terminology managers who publish or consume registered concept dictionaries.
- Registration authorities and providers of terminology/ontology services who must advertise and serve dictionary content on the Internet.
Typical applications include automated resolution of concept identifiers (IRDI) to human-readable definitions and formal ontology structures, enabling consistent data interpretation for asset tagging, engineering toolchains, procurement, and machine-to-machine (M2M) exchanges.
Related standards
- ISO/TS 29002-5 (defines the IRDI format referenced by this TS)
- Other parts of the ISO 29002 series covering exchange of characteristic data in industrial automation
Keywords: ISO/TS 29002-20, concept dictionary resolution services, industrial automation, terminology service, ontology service, IRDI, registration authority, semantic interoperability.