By Randall S. Newton
Streaming data visualization specialist RealityWave and Noumenon Consulting Ltd, creator of XMpLant, a popular converter for intelligent process plant information based on Internet standards, have announced a partnership to integrate their technologies into a collaboration solution for large project databases.
The beauty of this agreement is that many of the leading plant design software vendors have already adopted (or are in the process of adopting) XMpLant as a tool for accessing the data inside their proprietary formats. Thus, the new software to come from the RealityWave/Noumenon partnership holds the promise of allowing a large number of users—not just those on CAD stations—complete visual access to plant data as long as the data remains relevant.
“I am tremendously excited about the work that Noumenon and RealityWave are doing to optimize the speed, performance, and ability of companies to access, manage, and collaborate with large plant databases,” says Adrian Laud, CEO and founder of Noumenon. “Being able to work with data from any source, throughout the lifecycle of a plant, will revolutionize how organizations use the information that is currently locked up in the disparate systems and databases that they use today.”
XMpLant is a generic converter for intelligent process plant information, mapping information from one proprietary system to a neutral model and then out to another. XMpLant uses the models of ISO 15926 and ISO 10303 to deliver the neutral process plant model in XML, enabling downstream access to engineering information. There are interfaces to and from the major process plant applications enabling, exchange and integration of information across these applications. The use of ISO 10303 by XMpLant also enables the full geometric definition of plant models to be included, enabling XMpLant XML files to be used for long-term archive of plant models and related information.
“Throughout the typical plant lifecycle, the number of people who need to use design information, the ‘Information Consumers’, outnumber the ‘Information Creators’ by around 50 to 1,” notes Bard Salmon, CEO and Founder of RealityWave. “Combining the capabilities of XMpLant with RealityWave’s best-of-breed industry collaboration and visualization solutions will allow all users, whether Creators or Consumers, to access all the information they need.”
The two companies claim that by using VizStream and XMpLant, companies will be able to:
- Display extremely large models, combined from data from different systems, over the Web
- See their complete product model, maybe for the first time
- Identify, annotate and measure objects within large models
- Access associated documents and data
- Collaborate on a single integrated model, from any number of remote sites all over the world
- Use the solution from anywhere, anytime, and over any bandwidth connection.
Networks decentralize and amplify all processes they touch. That is why, in a nutshell, that the Internet can rightly be described as revolutionary. So, any application or service that extends the Internet’s ability to decentralize and amplify data (knowledge) into a specific discipline will also have a revolutionary impact. Such decentralization and amplification is what this partnership is about. The end result is that gigabits of information from multiple, proprietary systems are made visual to many people beyond the CAD guys now and throughout the useful life of the data—and the useful life of the plant.