Cocop.MessageSerialiser.Meas (C#) v.2.0.0

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COCOP - Coordinating Optimisation of Complex Industrial Processes
https://cocop-spire.eu/

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 723661. This piece of software reflects only the authors' views, and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

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Author

Petri Kannisto, Tampere University, Finland
https://github.com/kannisto
http://kannisto.org

Please make sure to read and understand LICENSE.txt!

COCOP Toolkit

This application is a part of COCOP Toolkit, which was developed to enable a decoupled and well-scalable architecture in industrial systems. Please see https://kannisto.github.io/Cocop-Toolkit/

Introduction

This library provides a generic API to serialise and deserialise (or to encode and decode) messages that contain measurement values and other data from industrial systems. Please familiarise yourself with this page: https://kannisto.github.io/Cocop-Toolkit/messageserialiser.html

All message structures are based on existing open standards. In this API, the standards have been created by and are copyrighted to the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC(r); https://www.ogc.org/). However, OGC is not the creator of this software, and this software has not been certified for compliance with any OGC standard.

Because the utilised standards are complex and versatile, the API selectively implements what is considered most important in industrial systems. To guarantee interoperability, the API implements a profile that covers a subset of the standards. In addition, there are extensions not included in the standards, but these are few.

The implemented features cover, for instance:

• measurement values of multiple types, such as:
  • numeric (floating point and integer)
  • boolean
  • enumeration (category)
  • time instant
  • time range
  • array
  • record of multiple values
• timeseries data (numeric)
• metadata of measurements
• remote control of long-running tasks
• request-response communication of measurements

This software has been implemented with C#/.NET. However, there is another implementation in Java (see https://github.com/kannisto/Cocop.MessageSerialiser.Meas_java). Still, because the serialisation syntax is XML, the messages do not restrict which platform to choose for implementation, as long as the messages comply with the standards-based profile. That is, you could have one application in .NET, another in Java and third in NodeJs, for instance, and these would be completely interoperable.

This repository contains the following applications:

• MessageSerialiserMeas: the actual library
• (All other projects): test applications

Source Code and API Doc

• Github repo: https://github.com/kannisto/Cocop.MessageSerialiser.Meas_csharp
• API documentation: https://kannisto.github.io/Cocop.MessageSerialiser.Meas_csharp

Messages

The following classes of this API can generate XML documents:

• Observation; this encloses a data item (Item_* classes) and associates related metadata.
• GetObservationRequest, GetObservationResponse, InsertObservationRequest and InsertObservationResponse; these can deliver observations in the request-response manner.
• TaskRequest and TaskResponse; these enable the remote control of long-running tasks.
• TaskStatusReport; this notifies about task progress.

That is, all other objects must be located in any of the above to be included in a message. Examples:

• To stream measurement data (Item_*) in the publish-subscribe manner, you would wrap each data item in an Observation.
• To explicitly retrieve data, you send a GetObservationRequest and receive a GetObservationResponse. In these, you again wrap your data (Item_*) in an Observation.

Please see the enclosed code examples.

Work of Third Parties

This software distribution does not include any third-party modules, that is, any of the utilised standards, the related XML schemata or any proxy software generated from these schemata. The reason is that the authors are not lawyers but software developers and the intention is to ensure that any copyright or licensing issues are avoided. Even if it were possible to distribute the OGC standards, these standards have dependencies to modules not copyrighted to the OGC, which adds difficulty to licensing. However, because this software library is largely based on the works of OGC, the OGC license conditions apply.

Still, because the third-party modules are necessary for this library to work, there are instructions to retrieve them. You must download the required XML schema files, generate the proxies and modify these as instructed. For more information, please see the folder '_codegen_xsd_exe'.

Environment

The development environment was Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 (Version 15.8.2).

The .NET Framework version is the ancient 4.5. This was chosen to reduce the risk that the application should be deployed in an environment that lacks a sufficiently new framework version.