EPISTLE Templates

The Requirement

The concept of templates has been developed within EPISTLE as a response to the following observations:

• The EPISTLE Core Model can be understood and interpreted in different ways, possibly leading to equally valid but inconsistent implementations.
• The EPISTLE Core Model is highly abstract; it is not readily understandable by domain experts, or by software developers working with specific application systems.
• Only a small number of potential implementations of the EPISTLE Core Model need consider the model as whole (i.e., database/data warehouse implementations that are intended to support integration across the full scope of process plant life-cycle data). If the EPISTLE Core Model to be technically and commercially successful, the majority of implementations will address interfaces between application systems, or between an application system and a database or data warehouse.

The Solution

EPISTLE templates are a proposed solution to these issues. An EPISTLE template is a view on the combination of the EPISTLE Core Model and the EPISTLE Reference Data Library; this view captures the information needs of a particular function, application, or group of applications. Further, by publishing these view specifications as XML schemas EPISTLE templates bridge the worlds of databases/data warehouses and e-commerce on the web.

Applications

EPISTLE Templates are standardised at several levels of compliance, all of which are represented as XML documents defined in accordance with XML Schema. At the simplest levels (0 and 1), these are equivalent to traditional pro-forma engineering documents, data sheets or exchange sets. At more detailed levels (2 and 3) these guarantee rigorous and repeatable mapping to the underlying model.

Further Information

The underlying methods and specifications for EPISTLE Templates are still under development, and their details have not yet been approved by the EPISTLE Management Committee. Detailed information about the development of templates is available at the ProcessML^TM website, and in the following papers:

• TEIJGELER, Hans. EPISTLE Templates. Presentation, November 2000
• TEIJGELER, Hans. Introduction to EPISTLE Templates. Presentation, April 2001
• TEIJGELER, Hans. ProcessML^TM Architecture. Rev.1.0, 29 May 2001.
• FOWLER, Julian. EPISTLE templates and the IIDEAS architecture. 2001-07-11.

Last update 2001-09-20