The following Energistics Specifications are under members and public review from November 15 through December 15, 2008. Comments and questions should be directed to Energistics by sending e-mail to Energistics.
Energistics Web Services Interoperability Standards, Version 1.0 Release Candidate
This is the first work product of the Energistics Technical Architecture Work Group, also known as the Web Services Interoperability Work Group. The document references a set of existing published standards, along with any relevant constraints (‘narrowing’) on those standards, to which internally developed applications can adhere and which can be used as part of the procurement process for new applications/tools to ensure interoperability of interfaces (i.e. Web Services) between organizations.
The future work of this Work Group is intended to include defining a consistent technical architecture reference that can apply to future versions of all of the Energistics Web Services and XML Data Exchange Standards Families. This work will be done in close cooperations with the other Special Interest Groups, including the WITSML SIG and PRODML SIG.
The following is taken from the Executive Summary of the document:
This industry standards document is in fact a collection of references and endorsements of well established underlying standards. The focus of the Web Services Interoperability Standards is to have an agreed upon nominal technology standard suite for interoperability in the energy industry. By agreeing to a suite of foundational technology standards, a significant amount of time and resources can be saved integrating processes between enterprises, divisions and even departments inside of organizations.
There was no desire to create standards at the protocol level. This effort intended to capture the best standards fit for foundational web service interoperability. Therefore, this information is best used to guide enterprise architects, solution developers, and solution and system integrators in the basic standards that should be used to assure ease of operation between other systems.
The purpose of this document is to describe a set of existing published standards, along with any relevant constraints (‘narrowing’ of the specifications) on those standards, to which internally developed applications can adhere and which can be used as part of the procurement process for newly purchased applications and/or tools to ensure interoperability of interfaces (i.e. Web Services) within and among organizations. When we speak of ‘narrowing’ the specifications, it usually means that we are excluding a certain part of the referenced specifications from our industry standards. As an example, SOAP allows for both RPC-style and document-style services, but for the purpose of these industry standards we are including only document-style services.
This document and standards in general are also intended to be a unifying technology standards reference for commercial application and software platform developers. By providing a suite of fundamental technology standards, the energy industry will be greatly aided in its ability to electronically connect processes between separate enterprises in an agile manner.
The overall philosophy was not to create new standards, but simply to enumerate a list of related existing standards which, taken as a whole, provide an overall profile of conforming Web Services that can reasonably be expected to work well within the energy industry.
This document provides a basis for application and system development that will enhance the ability of those systems to interoperate with systems in other enterprises. The goal is to have adoption of these stable, industry standards as a foundation of enterprise interoperability in the energy industry. Through industry agreement and coordinated adoption of these standards, real business value can be derived from the agility and speed of the emerging SOA technologies from both vendors and internally developed systems.