About OAGi and IOF

About OAGi and IOF

History

OAGi is a US-based non-profit standards organization established in 1995 for the purpose of addressing interoperability challenges among ERP systems through standards development. Over the years OAGi’s purpose has expanded to address interoperability challenges among any type of system within the enterprise (application-to-application) and between enterprises (business-to-business).

In 2016 an ad hoc group formed to develop industrial ontologies. The group’s name was the Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF). In 2019 IOF was folded into OAGi as the IOF organizational unit.

Given that OAGi’s ontology work is clearly associated with the IOF organizational unit, OAGi needed to give a name to the category of activities and resources that occurred from 1995 to the IOF formation in OAGi and beyond. OAGi has selected the name Connect.

Mission

OAGi’s Mission

OAGi’s mission is to continuously improve interoperability through business process models, data standards, ontologies, documentation, tools, best practices, and training.

IOF’s Mission

The IOF’s mission is to create a set of core and open reference ontologies that spans the entire domain of digital manufacturing. The IOF will work with government, industry, academic, and standards organizations to advance data interoperability in their respective fields.

Key Resources

Ontologies

OAGi’s IOF has produced industrial ontologies. One ontology is the IOF Core ontology, which serves as the basis for domain ontologies. IOF’s domain ontology work includes domains such as maintenance, supply chain, production process and scheduling, production service system, material science, MTConnect, systems engineering, and zero-defect manufacturing.

connectSpec (OAGIS)

connectSpec is OAGi’s primary interoperability standard. connectSpec is a branding update of OAGIS, which was used from 1995 to 2023. connectSpec is used by myriad companies in myriad industries in myriad geopolitical and process contexts. Given connectSpec’s broad applicability, it is an enormous standard. Consequently, OAGi and its members have develop tooling and best practices that enable companies to take advantage of all that connectSpec has to offer in a rapid and focused way.

connectSpec conforms to ISO 15000-5 and ISO 5054-1.

connectCenter (Score)

connectCenter is a browser-based tool for developing and managing data standards, creating standard profiles, and expressing the profiles in ways that make developers most productive. connectCenter supports model develop that conforms to ISO 15000-5 and ISO 5054-1. connectCenter features include:

  • ISO 15000-5 core component (data model) development and maintenance with support for state management and versioning.
  • ISO 15000-5 business information entity (BIE; data model profile) development and maintenance with support for state management and versioning.
  • BIE expression in a growing number of syntaxes, including:
    • JSON schema
    • API spec (conformant to Open API Spec v3)
    • XML schema
    • Excel
    • Open Document Format
    • CSV
    • Planned: XMI
    • Planned: RDF and/or OWL

Scenarios

OAGi Scenarios are process models and accompanying documentation. Each scenario is expressed as a UML sequence diagram or BPMN diagram. A major purpose of scenarios is to indicate where connectSpec-based messages are exchanged among systems or parties.

connectKits

OAGi and its partners offer several connectKits. A connectKit is a collection resources targeted to address a defined integration use case or set of integration use cases.