Open Know-Where
Description
Internet of Production:
"This standard was initiated by the Internet of Production Alliance and developed by an open-membership working group. It is designed to create a consistent way of documenting and sharing information about manufacturing capabilities to make it easier for people to identify where hardware can be made locally or anywhere in the world.
This specification is designed to be adopted by anyone who collects or shares data about manufacturing capabilities, including governments, non-government organisations (NGOs), aid agencies, mapping communities, makers and platforms. The standard defines data that meets the needs of a broad range of use cases and purposes.
We call this “Open Know-Where”.
Adopting the Open Know-Where standard will:
- Improve the discovery of manufacturing facilities and equipment within the manufacturing industry and maker communities.
- Enable someone who wants to access a manufacturing facility to discover who they should be contacting.
- Improve relationships and collaboration between users and networks.
- Make data about the location of manufacturing capabilities more easily discoverable and accessible when needed.
- Enable better curation and management of data, so it can be collated, organised, queried and filtered.
- Enable the curation of tools to extract the maximum value from the data.
Overall, the more universal the standard is, the more useful it will be. The principle is that it is an open standard, whether or not the data it is used to describe is released openly.
The standard covers five concepts (classes) that mapping initatives typically describe. For each concept, we have aimed to standardise the properties to an appropriate level of granularity, which is helping someone to find out where something can be made.
The five classes are:
- Manufacturing Facility
- Agent (Persons and Organisation)
- Location
- Equipment
- Materials
Several aspects of the classes can be standardised through classification and dictionaries. Using this approach means initiatives and manufacturing facilities can more easily share, compare and aggregate data. This is important, as currently there is no way to do this without duplication of field names and data. The ability to easily share data encourages the building of relationships and collaboration between users and networks. This will lead to improved documentation, networking, and discovery of mapping initiatives, manufacturing facilities and equipment within the manufacturing sectors and maker communities.
The intention is for data published under Open Know-Where, to be helpful and informative, rather than authorative. We assume that any procurement resulting from data published under this standard will still involve direct or mediated interaction between the user/buyer and the facility. Future versions of the specification will move towards more rigorous approaches to defining information to enable distributed procurement systems."
(https://standards.internetofproduction.org/pub/okw/release/2)