We met in a conference room at an office in Barrington, IL. A place where sometime later a couple guys thought they'd screw me in a business deal. I came out ahead in the end, but the place has mixed memories. This meeting involved thinking about the future of asset data and systems interoperability. We had a system diagram. The idea was to solve a huge problem for owner/operators of process manufacturing enterprises—flowing engineering data into other software systems for operations, maintenance, and enterprise. The incumbent system was a morass of paper (or pdf documents which was much the same thing). We did trademark searches and domain name searches and eventually settled on the Open Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem—OIIE. I plot this history for context for the conference I attended recently—the 2nd ADIF Workshop at Texas A&M University dubbed Driving Asset Data and Systems Interoperability Toward an Open and Neutral Data Ecosystem. This workshop brought together owne
