Anatoly Levenchuk's Runglish Blog

We at TechInvestLab have experience of introducing of ISO 15926 to general public (not professional ontologists) in self-education mode. It required very special reading sequence (in Russian this is in more details at http://dot15926.livejournal.com/27293.html):   

 I. Theory for general understanding.   

 1. Read a book of Chris Partridge “Business Objects: Re-Engineering for Re-Use” http://www.borosolutions.co.uk/research/content/files/books/BusObj-Printed-20050531-with-watermark.pdf/at_download/file (while this book has no references to ISO 15926 or any other language or software or standard). This is mandatory reading for all beginners. In Russian we have video about 4D vs 3D ontology that we recommend as addition for 7th Chapter of this book. Try to find something equal to support 4D understanding (it is very tricky).   

 2. Only then you should read “An Introduction to ISO 15926” issued by FIATECH consortium — http://fiatech.org/images/stories/techprojects/project_deliverables/iso-intro-ver1.pdf

3. Then you should read first part of book of Matthew West “Developing High Quality Data Models”: http://www.amazon.com/Developing-High-Quality-Data-Models/dp/0123751063 (second part of this book is HQDM specific data model, you need not to read it. First part is mandatory).  

4. Read thesis of Andries van Renssen “Gellish. A Generic Extensible Ontological Language”: http://repository.tudelft.nl/assets/uuid:de26132b-6f03-41b9-b882-c74b7e34a07d/its_renssen_20050914.pdf This is also not about ISO 15926 and not even 4D but there are many interesting things about relations and table format. Take ideas about table data representation and usage of ontology in engineering.  Take no ontology from this book (except very good set of relations).   

This is about 1200 pages (about 4 month for 4 hours/day or reading).   

Many people stops here. This is general education in engineering approach to ontology.   

II. Now you are ready to mastering knowledge of ISO 15926 as a standard.   

1. Read ISO 15926 Part 2 (this is upper ontology, 201 type of entities). 241 pages.   

2. Read 47 pages of draft of ISO 15926 Part 6 (RDL management).

3. Take  .15926 Editor (freeware, http://techinvestlab.ru/dot15926Editor) . Have fun browsing PCA RDL (about 2.7mln triples for near 50000 concepts like “centrifugal pump” — you can prefer do it online from SPARQL endpoint or load from OWL file that take about 1 minute 20 second on a notebook with our Editor). Spend not too much time for this. This is like reading Encyclopedia, only to get understanding.    

4. Read ISO 15926 Part 7 (templates in logic language Plan 9), 126 pages and Part 8 (templates in OWL). 

5. Now try to see examples from http://15926.info/ — now you have a chance to understand it. We have several examples of engineering data in .15926 Editor samples directory. See also sample diagrams on http://techinvestlab.ru/iso15926_sample_diagrams. Up to this moment you will find multiple examples from different sources.

6. Read “ISO 15926 outside” methodology for reference data engineering: http://techinvestlab.ru/files/RefDataEng/RefDataEngr_ver_2_25feb11.doc — 18 pages.    

7. Subscribe for community “ISO 15926” in LinkedIn and read discussions. Read http://iringug.org (implementations hub) and news at http://iringtoday.com.   

This is about 500 pages and many diagrams to understand. 2 month.

Most of people stops here. If you are not scared, proceed to real thing.   

III. Now you are ready to do you first ISO 15926 systems federation project.

Join somebody with ISO 15926 experience to supervise you modeling activity and tool chain mastering (e.g. TechInvestLab with .15926 Platform tool chain).

Welcome to the ontology-based systems federation community of practice! You have “yellow belt” qualification at this point.

After 3 year you will have “black belt” master level and can participate at Modeling Meeting of POCSCaesar Association.

This is valid for general public while for more experienced developers this self-education sequence can be passed really fast!