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 November 2024, 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). Andreas Bauer (Docufy) and Andreas Wernicke (DIN Media) were newly elected. The steering committee has a coordinator, short SCC. In the beginning of 2023, the steering committee elected Anne Kuhsen from SEW-Eurodrive as the coordinator for the next two years. The next SCC elections will be held in the beginning of 2025.
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 (Isabelle Fleury) 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.
They are currently working on a new release which is to be published in the 2nd quarter of 2025.
So far, iiRDS exists for the three domains
- core,
- machinery, and
- software.
Convener: Dr. 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. The working group supported the development and testing of the iiRDS Request API and the iiRDS Plugin for DITA-OT. Both projects started in fall 2023 and were released in 2024.
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, TC 3 of the IEC has revised our of a "Publicly Available Specification" (PAS) and published "IEC PAS 63485:2023 Intelligent Information Request and Delivery - A process model for the exchange of information for use" in October 2023. This represents 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. The working group is planning to submit a New Work Item Proposal (NP) to establish iiRDS as an International Standards (IS).
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. The InterOpera Asset Administration Shell submodel project "Intelligent Information for Use" based on iiRDS was completed and published in June 2023.
Convener: Dr. Michael Fritz, tekom Europe/tcworld GmbH