How the iiRDS Consortium Operates
Steering Committee
The members of the iiRDS Consortium, diverse in their expertise and interests, contribute their knowledge to the multifaceted potential of iiRDS – because the goal is to consistently establish and expand the standard in various areas.
The maintenance and further development of the standard is administered by the steering committee. During its annual meeting in 2022, the iiRDS Consortium elected the steering committee for the next two years. The following existing members ran again and were confirmed in office: Andreas Klüter (Empolis Information Management), Anne Kuhsen (SEW-Eurodrive), Jan Oevermann (plusmeta), Marcus Hoffmann (Siemens), Niko Schad (Heller), Ulrike Parson (parson), Volker Römisch (Noxum). Dominik Haag (Docufy) was newly elected. The steering committee has a coordinator. In the beginning of 2023, the steering committee elected Anne Kuhsen from SEW-Eurodrive as the coordinator for the next two years.
The office of the iiRDS Consortium is provided by the leading member (tekom). The office provides the presiden of the Consortium (Ralf Robers) and employees who take over the management and the communication of the Consortium, as the CEO (Michael Fritz) and the project manager (Susanne Lohmüller).
Working Groups
For the further development of iiRDS, the Consortium has established working groups to attain the goals defined in the annual roadmap. Three main directions for further development, which have been transferred to three working groups, have emerged here:
Development
This working group continuously reviews the functions of the standard for functionality and usefulness. A team of experts maintains and extends both the specification and the ontology, as well as the different industry-specific manifestations of the ontology.
So far, iiRDS exists for the three domains
- core,
- machinery, and
- software.
Convener: Harald Stadlbauer, Ninefeb
Tools – Validation – Content
The "Tools – Validation – Content" working group has set itself the goal of clarifying how the standard works and making it easier for interested parties to get started with iiRDS. For this purpose, concrete sample content for the fictitious fan "PI-Fan" was published in 2019. As the iiRDS Sample Content, this exemplifies how typical information for use can be tagged with standardized metadata. This is also where the iiRDS Open Toolkit was created, which enables users to enrich their own content with metadata in just a few steps and create iiRDS-compliant packages from it.
In November 2022, the iiRDS Validation Tool was released to validate generated iiRDS packages. This year, the working group supports the development and testing of the Request API and the iiRDS Plugin for DITA-OT. Both projects will start in fall 2023.
Convener: Dr. Achim Steinacker, Empolis Intelligent Views GmbH
Standards
The focus of the "Standards" working group is to be active in national and international standardization bodies in order to be able to convert iiRDS into an international standard. For example, TC3 of the IEC has a revised draft of a "Publicly Available Specification" (PAS), the acceptance of which would represent a major step into the world of standardization. The content addresses a model of the information flow and also recommends the minimum metadata requirements for an iiRDS-compliant package.
Furthermore, iiRDS succeeded in being listed in the "Maintenance" chapter of the German Standardization Roadmap, Industry 4.0, a joint project of DIN, DKE and the Standardization Council 4.0.
Convener: Dr. Michael Fritz, tekom Europe/tcworld GmbH
Request Part Sub-Working Group
The focus of the "Request Part" sub-working group is to define the request use cases and results as well as the requirements enabling request processes with iiRDS. The aim is to develop the request part of iiRDS, for example with the help of the development of a corresponding API.
Coordinator: Dr. Harald Stadlbauer, Ninefeb