ISO/TC 184/SC 4 Industrial Data

Welcome to the community of Industrial Data!  In almost every interaction you have with the physical world, a virtual representation of that experience was created somewhere, by someone in order to provide you with the richest experience possible.  Industrial Data exists in every aspect of society.  From the earliest ideas about how to make the world better, to the concept phase where many ideas are evaluated to the design and manufacturing of real products and services through the support cycle and finally reclamation and recycling in a circular economy, Industrial Data allows computers to create a digital representation of these experiences.

Formally, our scope is:

Standardization of the content, meaning, structure, representation and quality management of the information required to define an engineered product and its characteristics at any required level of detail at any part of its life-cycle from conception through disposal, together with the interfaces required to deliver and collect the information necessary to support any business or technical process or service related to that engineered product during its life-cycle.

Note: Life-cycle includes recursive recycling to a terminal state.

Industrial Data

Building standards for industrial data requires a high-level framework to ensure the consistency and interoperability of the standards.  The standards developed within ISO/TC 184/SC 4 are based on the premise that:

• there are fundamental commonalities between different industries;
• industrial data can be considered as a product of some industrial process and subject to generalized life-cycle activities.

Models enable us to structure and organize concepts for meaningful use.  In this context, we use two models to frame the use of Industrial Data.  These are informative models, which describe the industrial environment within which ISO/TC 184/SC 4 standards are appropriate and show the commonality between the types of information in the environment. These are the Industry Structure model, which describes the hierarchical structure of the customer supply chain, and the Life-Cycle Activities (LCA) model, which defines a generalized set of life-cycle activities.

This framework covers the following key topics:

• interoperability of product data definitions (ISO 10303 and ISO 15926);
• manufacturing (ISO 15531, ISO 18629, ISO 18828 and ISO 18876);
• visualization (ISO 14306 and ISO/PAS 17506).

In both models, there includes a set of terms, concepts, and relationships that frame the context of Industrial Data.  These industrial contexts cover the full range of industrial settings.  Both the discrete manufacturing industry and the process industry are in scope.  In addition to the data content, ISO/TC 184/SC 4 is also concerned with the quality of the data.  A data quality framework is used as a foundation for ensuring that data meets expectations and is fit for use.  The following framework is used to describe the high-level context (see ISO 8000: Data Quality).

Finally, ISO/TC 184/SC 4 maintains a set of standards that provide for representing and exchanging reusable content for industrial use.