Terms & Definitions for IIoT.

The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC) has announced version 2.0 of the Industrial Internet Vocabulary Technical Report. The report provides IIoT vocabulary terms and definitions that enable all stakeholders in the IIoT ecosystem, from system architects to IT managers to plant managers to business decision makers, to communicate with each other effectively.

The IIC Vocabulary Technical Report v2.0 is the foundation for the collective body of work from the IIC, ensuring that consistent terminology is used throughout all IIC publications. This includes the Industrial Reference Architecture (IRA), Industrial Internet Security Framework (IISF), Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework (IICF) and the Business Strategy and Innovation Framework (BSIF) that collectively comprise the IIC IIoT suite.

“The Industrial Internet comprises a diverse set of industries and people with various skill sets and expertise. Often, concepts and terminology in one field will have different meanings in another, leading to confusion,” said Anish Karmarkar, IIC Vocabulary Task Group Chair, and Director, Standards Strategy & Architecture at Oracle. “Industrial Internet projects succeed when participants can communicate using common vocabulary terms and definitions. The IIC Industrial Internet Vocabulary Technical Report v2.0 ensures all IIoT stakeholders are speaking the same language, avoiding what would otherwise be an IIoT ‘Tower of Babel.’”

The Industrial Internet Vocabulary Technical Report v2.0 was developed by members of the IIC Vocabulary Task Group, which is part of the IIC Technology Working Group, comprised of software architects, business experts, and security experts. The group analyzed the previous version of the report and made the following updates:

• Interdependent terms were aligned to create a cohesive whole.
• Terms were eliminated if they did not have a specific meaning in IIoT, if the dictionary meaning was already sufficient or if there were other terms that were better replacements.
• Terms were added following the publication of the IIC IISF and the IIC IRA V1.8.

“The IIoT is changing quickly and as such, the meaning of specific words and phrases has also changed,” said Marcellus Buchheit, member of the IIC Vocabulary Task Group, and co-founder, President and CEO of WIBU-SYSTEMS USA. “The vocabulary team reviewed nearly every first edition term, removing 11 unnecessary terms, adding 16 terms and redefining 11 terms. Our goal was simplicity, clarity, and relevancy to the IIoT.”

New to version 2.0, the IIC Vocabulary Task Group voted to add the prefix “IoT” to terms such as device, sensor, actuator and connected their interdependencies with endpoint, component and interface to align these terms as part of a cohesive whole. A definition for “trustworthiness” was added following the publication of the IISF and several terms, such as application domain, operations domain, implementation viewpoint and usage viewpoint were added following the publication of the IIRA V1.8.

"Vocabulary is where stakeholders come together from Working and Task Groups to discuss and agree on the commonality across their interests,” said Eric Harper, IIC Steering Committee Member and Senior Principal Scientist, ABB. “The IIC Vocabulary 2.0 release continues this process by generalizing architecture concepts to prepare the way for contributions focused on edge computing and interoperability.”

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