Open Communications Standards

Open systems are based upon widely accepted industry standards. An effort has been made to organize the hardware and software tasks of networking, through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), which has developed a reference model for the protocols used in communications. Its formal name is the “International Organization for Standardization Reference Model for Open Systems Interconnection (ISO/OSI)”. The ISO model categorizes the various protocols into seven layers, each of which can be involved in transmitting a message from one system element to another. Enhanced Performance Architecture is a simplified OSI model for use when the network is not so complex, such as the readers would find in the fieldbus structure. Dynamic Data Exchange is a standard communications protocol that allows several different Windows programs to share data. Object linking and embedding was developed by Microsoft to provide component object models that serve as the basis for integrating applications.