The title, "Industrial automation systems and integration—Integration of life-cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities", is regarded too narrow by the present ISO 15926 developers.
The focus of this research project was to develop a data model for lifecycle information of a facility that would suit the requirements of the process industries.
In that AP221 we saw, for the first time, an Annex M with a list of standard instances of the AP221 data model, including types of objects.
In the early nineties EPISTLE started an activity to extend Annex M to become a library of such object classes and their relationships: STEPlib.
100 domain experts from all three member consortia, spread over the various expertises (e.g. Electrical, Piping, Rotating equipment, etc.
Initially this was based on XML Schema (the only useful W3C Recommendation available then), but when Web Ontology Language (OWL) became available it was clear that provided a far more suitable environment for Part 7.
In 2004, the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) released a report on the impact of the lack of digital interoperability in the capital projects industry.
[1] ISO 15926 has thirteen parts (as of February 2022): The model and the library are suitable for representing lifecycle information about technical installations and their components.
Another, more limited, use of the standard is as a reference classification for harmonization purposes between shared databases and product catalogues that are not based on ISO 15926.
The purpose of ISO 15926 is to provide a Lingua Franca for computer systems, thereby integrating the information produced by them.
These constructs then are mapped to more efficient classes of n-ary relations that interlink the Nodes that are involved in the represented information.
Each participating computer system maps its data from its internal format to such ISO-standard Node and Template instances.
They are defined in XML Schema and they are, in essence, only a structure containing cells that make reference to instances of Templates.
There are thousands of different types of physical objects in a facility (pumps, compressors, pipes, instruments, fluids, etc).