Darkforest is a computer go program developed by Meta Platforms, based on deep learning techniques using a convolutional neural network. Its updated version Darkfores2 combines the techniques of its predecessor with Monte Carlo tree search. The MCTS effectively takes tree search methods commonly seen in computer chess programs and randomizes them. With the update, the system is known as Darkfmcts3. Darkforest is of similar strength to programs like CrazyStone and Zen. It has been tested against a professional human player at the 2016 UEC cup. Google's AlphaGo program won against a professional player in October 2015 using a similar combination of techniques. Darkforest is named after Liu Cixin's science fiction novel The Dark Forest. == Background == Competing with top human players in the ancient game of Go has been a long-term goal of artificial intelligence. Go's high branching factor makes traditional search techniques ineffective, even on cutting-edge hardware, and Go's evaluation function could change drastically with one stone change. However, by using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network designed for long-term predictions, Darkforest has been able to substantially improve the win rate for bots over more traditional Monte Carlo Tree Search based approaches. === Matches === Against human players, Darkfores2 achieves a stable 3d ranking on KGS Go Server, which roughly corresponds to an advanced amateur human player. However, after adding Monte Carlo Tree Search to Darkfores2 to create a much stronger player named darkfmcts3, it can achieve a 5d ranking on the KGS Go Server. ==== Against other AI ==== darkfmcts3 is on par with state-of-the-art Go AIs such as Zen, DolBaram and Crazy Stone, but lags behind AlphaGo. It won 3rd place in January 2016 KGS Bot Tournament against other Go AIs. === News coverage === After Google's AlphaGo won against Fan Hui in 2015, Facebook made its AI's hardware designs public, alongside releasing the code behind DarkForest as open-source, in addition to heavy recruiting to strengthen its team of AI engineers. == Style of play == Darkforest uses a neural network to sort through the 10100 board positions, and find the most powerful next move. However, neural networks alone cannot match the level of good amateur players or the best search-based Go engines, and so Darkfores2 combines the neural network approach with a search-based machine. A database of 250,000 real Go games were used in the development of Darkforest, with 220,000 used as a training set and the rest used to test the neural network's ability to predict the next moves played in the real games. This allows Darkforest to accurately evaluate the global state of the board, but local tactics were still poor. Search-based engines have poor global evaluation, but are good at local tactics. Combining these two approaches is difficult because search-based engines work much faster than neural networks, a problem which was solved in Darkfores2 by running the processes in parallel with frequent communication between the two. === Conventional strategies === Go is generally played by analyzing the position of the stones on the board. Various advanced players have described it as playing in some part subconsciously. Unlike chess and checkers, where AI players can simply look further forward at moves than human players, but with each round of Go having on average 250 possible moves, that approach is ineffective. Instead, neural networks copy human play by training the AI systems on images of successful moves, the AI can effectively learn how to interpret how the board looks, as many grandmasters do. In November 2015, Facebook demonstrated the combination of MCTS with neural networks, which played with a style that "felt human". === Flaws === It has been noted that Darkforest still has flaws in its playstyle. The bot sometimes plays tenuki ("move elsewhere") pointlessly when local powerful moves are required. When the bot is losing, it shows the typical behavior of MCTS, it plays bad moves and loses more. The Facebook AI team has acknowledged these as areas of future improvement. == Program architecture == The family of Darkforest computer go programs is based on convolution neural networks. The most recent advances in Darkfmcts3 combined convolutional neural networks with more traditional Monte Carlo tree search. Darkfmcts3 is the most advanced version of Darkforest, which combines Facebook's most advanced convolutional neural network architecture from Darkfores2 with a Monte Carlo tree search. Darkfmcts3 relies on a convolution neural networks that predicts the next k moves based on the current state of play. It treats the board as a 19x19 image with multiple channels. Each channel represents a different aspect of board information based upon the specific style of play. For standard and extended play, there are 21 and 25 different channels, respectively. In standard play, each players liberties are represented as six binary channels or planes. The respective plane is true if the player one, two, or three or more liberties available. Ko (i.e. illegal moves) is represented as one binary plane. Stone placement for each opponent and empty board positions are represented as three binary planes, and the duration since a stone has been placed is represented as real numbers on two planes, one for each player. Lastly, the opponents rank is represented by nine binary planes, where if all are true, the player is a 9d level, if 8 are true, an 8d level, and so forth. Extended play additionally considers the border (binary plane that is true at the border), position mask (represented as distance from the board center, i.e. x ( − 0.5 ∗ d i s t a n c e 2 ) {\displaystyle x^{(-0.5distance^{2})}} , where x {\displaystyle x} is a real number at a position), and each player's territory (binary, based on which player a location is closer to). Darkfmct3 uses a 12-layer full convolutional network with a width of 384 nodes without weight sharing or pooling. Each convolutional layer is followed by a rectified linear unit, a popular activation function for deep neural networks. A key innovation of Darkfmct3 compared to previous approaches is that it uses only one softmax function to predict the next move, which enables the approach to reduce the overall number of parameters. Darkfmct3 was trained against 300 random selected games from an empirical dataset representing different game stages. The learning rate was determined by vanilla stochastic gradient descent. Darkfmct3 synchronously couples a convolutional neural network with a Monte Carlo tree search. Since the convolutional neural network is computationally taxing, the Monte Carlo tree search focuses computation on the more likely game play trajectories. By running the neural network synchronously with the Monte Carlo tree search, it is possible to guarantee that each node is expanded by the moves predicted by the neural network. == Comparison with other systems == Darkfores2 beats Darkforest, its neural network-only predecessor, around 90% of the time, and Pachi, one of the best search-based engines, around 95% of the time. On the Kyu rating system, Darkforest holds a 1-2d level. Darkfores2 achieves a stable 3d level on KGS Go Server as a ranked bot. With the added Monte Carlo tree search, Darkfmcts3 with 5,000 rollouts beats Pachi with 10k rollouts in all 250 games; with 75k rollouts it achieves a stable 5d level in KGS server, on par with state-of-the-art Go AIs (e.g., Zen, DolBaram, CrazyStone); with 110k rollouts, it won the 3rd place in January KGS Go Tournament.
Online OS
The Online Operating System was a fully multi-lingual and free to use web desktop written in JavaScript using Ajax. It was a Windows-based desktop environment with open-source applications and system utilities developed upon the reBOX web application framework by iCUBE Network Solutions, an Austrian company located in Vienna. == About the project == OOS.cc, which is short for Online Operating System, was a web application platform that mimicked the look and feel of classic desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X or KDE. It consisted of various open source applications built upon the so-called reBOX web application framework. As applications could be executed in an integrated and parallel way, the OOS could have been considered a web desktop or webtop. It provided basic services such as a GUI, a virtual file system, access control management and possibilities to develop and deploy applications online. As the Online Operating System was executed within a web browser, it was no real operating system but rather a portal to various web applications, offering a high usability and flexibility. The project was partly funded by grants from the Internetprivatstiftung Austria (IPA). As at 01.08.2008 almost 20.000 users have joined the oos.cc community, using the offered featured and applications. == History == The development of the web desktop was started by iCUBE Network Solutions in 2005, followed by the first beta releases in 2006. Hence, together with YouOS and eyeOS, it can be considered to be one of the first publicly available systems of its kind. The first full version including core-level multi-language support, the file system and a basic set of applications was released to the public in March 2007 on the occasion of a national exhibition (ITnT Austria Archived 2007-06-30 at the Wayback Machine) and has left beta state half a year later in October 2007. The first release considered stable (1.0.0) was published in July 2007. The project itself and the contained applications have received several national innovation awards (see,) and have gained attention mainly due to the comprehensive approach taken (see,). OOS.cc started as a national project. The full platform including all offered applications are currently available in three languages (German, English as well as Spanish) and is receiving increasing coverage around the world (for examples see, or). The current version is 1.3.01 from 01.08.2008. == Technical overview == The project is fully written in JavaScript, exclusively using DHTML techniques to run in any web browser without any additional software installation needed. The system implements a modern kind of web application model, excessively using Ajax for communicating between client components and the Java server backend in an exclusively asynchronous manner. Aim is to offer users the unique interaction behavior following the desktop metaphor, which is the main idea of any web desktop. Also typical for this sort of web application is the broadly use of Javascript-on-demand techniques, cutting the complete project source into pieces and loading them instantly when needed. Based on this technical basis, reBOX was the framework library all applications in oos.cc were built of. It is a fully flexible and extensible API, including a GUI widget set, communication mechanisms and server services offering general and framework specific services. The Online Operating System itself consisted of a basic framework, which was able to launch any JavaScript application using the reBOX library. The user interface was based on the behavior of the Windows desktop with a start menu, a task bar and a desktop background. All applications were running in this environment. At server side, there were Java based web services that ran to serve the client processes and to provide data from the relational database in the backend. oos.cc also provided an integrated development environment called Developer Suite, which allowed the community to build own applications for the desktop environment based on reBOX (see development section below). == License == All applications available in oos.cc were open source under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). The reBOX development toolkit is free to use developing any applications for the webtop. == Features == As mentioned above, all applications published on oos.cc are open source based on the EUPL, and can be "installed" or "deinstalled" to what-ever preferences the user has. Besides global services like the multi-language support or the global theme support, as well as some minor tools and games, oos.cc offered four major services that could be used completely free of charge. Integrated and fully flexible file storage (1 GB per user) HTTP as well as FTP file transfer from and to local file system User-based file-shares within the oos-community WebDAV access Document Management (including Version Control and File Locking mechanisms) Image publishing, organization and post-processing A free sub domain (user.oos.cc) for web- or image publishing, directly integrated in the desktop Groupware applications, including free mail, fetchmail and contact management An integrated development environment where oos-applications can be created directly from within the system (see development section below) Next releases were planned to focus on an extensive security and privacy suite, dealing with challenges like anonymous communication (browsing as well as temporary mail-addresses) as well as offering encrypted password and file storage and connectivity services. Since its initial stable release, OOS.cc could have been accessed using https to ensure secure communication. == Limitations and drawbacks == Limited number of applications: no commercial applications can be hosted. Only reviewed applications are being published No processing of popular office formats (.doc, .odt, etc.) Limited language support: Only English, German and Spanish Dependence on foreign infrastructure: No possibility to extend storage, no additional/guaranteed bandwidth, etc. == Development == One of the key focuses of the team was right from the beginning to offer a very flexible and comprehensive API, that can be used to develop not only custom applications within oos.cc, but also stand-alone web-applications or to integrate single components in existing web-sites. By decoupling the development from web-related "problems" using the reBOX API web-applications can be development in a similar fashion to any Java program: Elements can be positioned and can interact like in high-level object oriented programming languages, without taking care of divs, browser specific behavior or communication handling. The framework also offers multi-language and theme support for existing as well as newly created applications, allowing changing almost every aspect of the look and feel of the used components according to the preferences of its users. For taking advantage of this approach, one of the applications offered in the OOS was an integrated Development Suite, allowing directly writing and executing code and hence creating new programs within the boundaries of the web computer. All applications on oos.cc were released as open source, thus all existing programs were offered to be imported, reviewed or changed and then locally deployed. Following this idea, every user was free to submit changed or newly created applications to be included in the globally offered application set. The last release offered features like auto-completion and an outline-window.
Hallin's spheres
Hallin's spheres is a theory of news reporting and its rhetorical framing posited by journalism historian Daniel C. Hallin in his 1986 book The Uncensored War to explain the news coverage of the Vietnam War. Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts. Hallin's spheres, which deals with the media, are similar to the Overton window, which deals with public opinion generally, and posits a sliding scale of public opinion on any given issue ranging from conventional wisdom to unacceptable. Hallin used the concept of framing to describe the presentation and reception of issues in public. For example, framing the use of drugs as criminal activity can encourage the public to consider that behavior anti-social. Hallin's work was later referred to in the controversial formulation of the concept of an opinion corridor, in which the range of acceptable public opinion narrows, and opinion outside that corridor moves from legitimate controversy into deviance. == Description == === Sphere of consensus === This sphere contains those topics on which there is widespread agreement, or at least the perception thereof. Within the sphere of consensus, "journalists feel free to invoke a generalized 'we' and to take for granted shared values and shared assumptions". Examples include such things as motherhood and apple pie. For topics in this sphere, journalists feel free to be advocating cheerleaders without having to be neutral or present any opposing view point and be disinterested observers." === Sphere of legitimate controversy === For topics in this sphere rational and informed people hold differing views within limited range. These topics are therefore the most important to cover, and also ones upon which journalists are seemingly obliged to remain disinterested reporters, rather than advocating for or against a particular view. Schudson notes that Hallin, in his influential study of the US media during the Vietnam War, argues that journalism's commitment to objectivity has always been compartmentalized. That is, within a certain sphere—the sphere of legitimate controversy—journalists seek conscientiously to be balanced and objective. The work of Walter Williams professor at the University of Missouri, Rod Petersen, advanced the idea that priming—controlling the narratives that media covers—can be the tool that media use to get deviant news subjects into the legitimate controversial circles of new coverage. === Sphere of deviance === Topics in this sphere are rejected by journalists as being unworthy of general consideration. Such views are perceived as being out of hand, unfounded, taboo, or of such minor consequence that they are not newsworthy. Hallin argues that in the sphere of deviance, "journalists also depart from standard norms of objective reporting and feel authorized to treat as marginal, laughable, dangerous". They either avoid mentioning or ridicule the controversial subject as outside the bounds of acceptable controversy; and they censor the individuals and groups who are associated with it. A simple example: a person claiming that aliens are manipulating college basketball scores might have difficulty finding sports media coverage for such a claim. A more political example: the US media regulator FCC's "Fairness Doctrine" aimed at radio stations, advocated balance between right and left political news and opinions, yet specified that broadcasters did not have to reserve any space or time for Communist viewpoints. == Uses of the terms == Craig Watkins (2001, pp. 92–94) makes use of the Hallin's spheres in a paper examining ABC, CBS, and NBC television network television news coverage of the Million Man March, a demonstration that took place in Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995. Watkins analyzes the dominant framing practices—problem definition, rhetorical devices, use of sources, and images—employed by journalists to make sense of this particular expression of political protest. He argues that Hallin's three spheres are a way for media framing practices to develop specific reportorial contexts, and each sphere develops its own distinct style of news reporting resources by different rhetorical tropes and discourses. Piers Robinson (2001, p. 536) uses the concept in relation to debates that have emerged over the extent to which the mass media serves elite interests or, alternatively, plays a powerful role in shaping political outcomes. His article reviews Hallin's spheres as an example of media-state relations, that highlights theoretical and empirical shortcomings in the 'manufacturing consent' thesis (Chomsky, McChesney). Robinson argues that a more nuanced and bi-directional understanding is needed of the direction of influence between media and the state that builds upon, rather than rejecting, existing theoretical accounts. Hallin's theory assumed a relatively homogenized media environment, where most producers were trying to reach most consumers. A more fractured media landscape can challenge this assumption because different audiences may place topics in different spheres, a concept related to the filter bubble, which posits that many members of the public choose to limit their media consumption to the areas of consensus and deviance that they personally prefer.
Retrieval-based Voice Conversion
Retrieval-based Voice Conversion (RVC) is an open source voice conversion AI algorithm that enables realistic speech-to-speech transformations, accurately preserving the intonation and audio characteristics of the original speaker. == Overview == In contrast to text-to-speech systems such as ElevenLabs, RVC differs by providing speech-to-speech outputs instead. It maintains the modulation, timbre and vocal attributes of the original speaker, making it suitable for applications where emotional tone is crucial. The algorithm enables both pre-processed and real-time voice conversion with low latency. This real-time capability marks a significant advancement over previous AI voice conversion technologies, such as So-vits SVC. Its speed and accuracy have led many to note that its generated voices sound near-indistinguishable from "real life", provided that sufficient computational specifications and resources (e.g., a powerful GPU and ample RAM) are available when running it locally and that a high-quality voice model is used. == Technical foundation == Retrieval-based Voice Conversion (RVC) utilizes a hybrid approach that integrates feature extraction with retrieval-based synthesis. Instead of directly mapping source speaker features to the target speaker using statistical models, RVC retrieves relevant segments from a target speech database, aiming to enhance the naturalness and speaker fidelity of the converted speech. At a high level, the RVC system typically comprises three main components: (1) a content feature extractor, such as a phonetic posteriorgram (PPG) encoder or self-supervised models like HuBERT; (2) a vector retrieval module that searches a target voice database for the most similar speech units; and (3) a vocoder or neural decoder that synthesizes waveform output from the retrieved representations. The retrieval-based paradigm aims to mitigate the oversmoothing effect commonly observed in fully neural sequence-to-sequence models, potentially leading to more expressive and natural-sounding speech. Furthermore, with the incorporation of high-dimensional embeddings and k-nearest-neighbor search algorithms, the model can perform efficient matching across large-scale databases without significant computational overhead. Recent RVC frameworks have incorporated adversarial learning strategies and GAN-based vocoders, such as HiFi-GAN, to enhance synthesis quality. These integrations have been shown to produce clearer harmonics and reduce reconstruction errors. == Research developments == Research on RVC has recently explored the use of self-supervised learning (SSL) encoders such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT to replace hand-engineered features like MFCCs. These encoders improve content preservation, especially when source and target speakers have dissimilar speaking styles or accents. Moreover, modern RVC models leverage vector quantization methods to discretize the acoustic space, improving both synthesis accuracy and generalization across unseen speakers. For example, retrieval-augmented VQ models can condition the synthesis stage on quantized speech tokens, which enhances controllability and style transfer. Despite its strengths, RVC still faces limitations related to database coverage, especially in real-time or few-shot settings. Inadequate diversity in the target voice corpus may lead to suboptimal retrieval or unnatural prosody. These advances demonstrate the viability of RVC as a strong alternative to conventional deep learning VC systems, balancing both flexibility and efficiency in diverse voice synthesis applications. == Training process == The training pipeline for retrieval-based voice conversion typically includes a preprocessing step where the target speaker's dataset is segmented and normalized. A pitch extractor such as librosa or DDSP-DDC may be used to obtain fundamental frequency (F0) features. During training, the model learns to map content features from the source speaker to the acoustic representation of the target speaker while maintaining pitch and prosody. The training objective often combines reconstruction loss with feature consistency loss across intermediate layers, and may incorporate cycle consistency loss to preserve speaker identity. Fine-tuning on small datasets is feasible due to the use of pre-trained models, particularly for the SSL encoder and content extractor components. This approach allows transfer learning to be applied effectively, enabling the model to converge faster and generalize better to unseen inputs. Most open implementations support batch training, gradient accumulation, and mixed-precision acceleration (e.g., FP16), especially when utilizing NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPUs. == Real-time deployment == RVC systems can be deployed in real-time scenarios through WebUI interfaces and streaming audio frameworks. Optimizations include converting the inference graph to ONNX or TensorRT formats, reducing latency. Audio buffers are typically processed in chunks of 0.2–0.5 seconds to ensure minimal delay and seamless conversion. Cross-platform compatibility with tools such as OBS Studio and Voicemeeter enables integration into live streaming, video production, or virtual avatar environments. == Applications and concerns == The technology enables voice changing and mimicry, allowing users to create accurate models of others using only a negligible amount of minutes of clear audio samples. These voice models can be saved as .pth (PyTorch) files. While this capability facilitates numerous creative applications, it has also raised concerns about potential misuse as deepfake software for identity theft and malicious impersonation through voice calls. == Ethical and legal considerations == As with other deep generative models, the rise of RVC technology has led to increasing debate about copyright, consent, and authorship. While some jurisdictions may allow parody or fair use in creative contexts, impersonating living individuals without permission may infringe upon privacy and likeness rights. As a result, some platforms have begun issuing takedown notices against AI-generated voice content that closely mimics celebrities or musicians. === In pop culture === RVC inference has been used to create realistic depictions of song covers, such as replacing original vocals with characters like Twilight Sparkle and Mordecai to have them sing duets of popular music like "Airplanes" and "Somebody That I Used to Know." These AI-generated covers, which can sound strikingly similar to the voice imitated, have gained popularity on platforms like YouTube as humorous memes.
ITU-WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health
The ITU-WHO Focus Group on Artificial Intelligence for Health (AI for Health) was an inter-agency collaboration from 2018 between the World Health Organization and the ITU, which in 2019 created a benchmarking framework to assess the accuracy of AI in health. The organization convened an international network of experts and stakeholders from fields like research, practice, regulation, ethics, public health, etc, that developed guideline documentation and code. The documents have addressed ethics, assessment/evaluation, handling, and regulation of AI for health solutions, covering specific use cases including AI in ophthalmology, histopathology, dentistry, malaria detection, radiology, symptom checker applications, etc. FG-AI4H has established an ad hoc group concerned with digital technologies for health emergencies, including COVID-19. All documentation is public. The idea for the Focus Group came out of the Health Track of the 2018 AI for Good Global Summit. Administratively, FG-AI4H was created by ITU-T Study Group 16. Under ITU-T's framework, participation in Focus Groups is open to anyone from an ITU Member State. The secretariat is provided by the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (under Director Chaesub Lee). It was first created at the July 2018 meeting with a lifetime of two years, at the July 2020 meeting, this was extended for another two years, where the focus group also submitted its deliverables to its parent body. It was also presented at the NeurIPS 2020 health workshop. In July 2023 "the work was grandfathered in the Global Initiative on AI for Health (GI-AI4H)". == AI for Health Framework == The outline of the benchmarking framework was published in a 2019 commentary in The Lancet. The output of the Focus Group AI for Health were structured in the AI for Health Framework. Depending on their primary domain being health or ICT, the individual components of the AI for Health Framework were ratified by the corresponding United Nations Specialized Agency, as WHO Guidelines and ITU Recommendations respectively. Standards drawn up by FG-AI4H were titled as: AI4H ethics considerations AI4H regulatory [best practices | considerations] AI4H requirements specification AI software life cycle specification Data specification AI training best practices specification AI4H evaluation considerations AI4H scale-up and adoption AI4H applications and platforms Use cases of the ITU-WHO Focus Group on AI for Health
CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (also known as CMUdict) is an open-source pronouncing dictionary originally created by the Speech Group at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) for use in speech recognition research. CMUdict provides a mapping orthographic/phonetic for English words in their North American pronunciations. It is commonly used to generate representations for speech recognition (ASR), e.g. the CMU Sphinx system, and speech synthesis (TTS), e.g. the Festival system. CMUdict can be used as a training corpus for building statistical grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) models that will generate pronunciations for words not yet included in the dictionary. The most recent release is 0.7b; it contains over 134,000 entries. An interactive lookup version is available. == Database format == The database is distributed as a plain text file with one entry to a line in the format "WORD
POSC Caesar
POSC Caesar Association (PCA) is an international, open and not-for-profit, member organization that promotes the development of open specifications to be used as standards for enabling the interoperability of data, software and related matters. PCA is the initiator of ISO 15926 "Integration of life-cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities" and is committed to its maintenance and enhancement. Nils Sandsmark has been the General Manager of POSC Caesar Association since 1999 and Thore Langeland, Norwegian Oil Industry Association (Norwegian: Oljeindustriens Landsforening, OLF), is the chairman of the board. == History == === Caesar Offshore === The first predecessor of POSC Caesar Association, the Caesar Offshore program, started in 1993. The original focus was on standardizing technical data definitions for capital intensive projects at the handover from the EPC contractor to the owner/operators of onshore and offshore oil and gas production facilities. The program was sponsored by The Research Council of Norway, two EPC contractors (Aker Maritime and Kværner), three owners/operators (Norsk Hydro, Saga Petroleum and Statoil) and DNV as service provider and project owner. === POSC Caesar project === During the period 1994–96, Caesar Offshore Program was defined as a project of Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation (POSC) (now Energistics), and changed its name to the POSC Caesar Project. In 1995 the project was joined by BP, Brown and Root and Elf Aquitaine and in 1997 by Intergraph, IBM, Oracle, Lloyd's, Shell, ABB and UMOE Technologies. During that time, POSC Caesar also became a member of European Process Industries STEP Technical Liaison Executive (EPISTLE) where it collaborates with PISTEP (UK), and USPI-NL (The Netherlands) on the development of ISO 10303, also known as "Standard for the Exchange of Product model data (STEP)". === POSC Caesar Association === In 1997, POSC Caesar Association was founded as an independent, global, non-profit, member organization. POSC Caesar Association serves an international membership and collaborates with other international organizations. It has its main office in Norway. Albeit the name of POSC Caesar Association still hints to its past as a project within the Petrotechnical Open Software Corporation (POSC) (now Energistics), from 1997 onwards, the organization has been independent. Energistics and POSC Caesar Association do collaborate, and are formally member in each other's organization. == Membership == POSC Caesar Association has with its current 36 members from around the world and has established an international footprint (with a strong membership in Norway) that includes a variety of backgrounds, from academia and solution providers to engineering contractors and owners/operators. The members are (subdivided by organization type): Associations: Energistics (USA) and The Norwegian Oil Industry Association (OLF, Norway); Universities and Research Institutes: International Research Institute of Stavanger (IRIS, Norway), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU, Norway), Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST, Korea), SINTEF (Norway), University of Bergen (Norway), University of Oslo (Norway), University of Stavanger (Norway), University of Tromsø (Norway) and Western Norway Research Institute (Norway); Oil and Gas Companies: BP (UK), Petronas (Malaysia) and Statoil (Norway); Engineering contractors and consultants: Akvaplan-niva (Norway), Aker Solutions (Norway), Asset Life Cycle Information Management (ALCIM, Malaysia), CAESAR systems (USA), Bechtel (USA), Det Norske Veritas (DNV, Norway), Information Logic (USA) and iXIT Engineering Technology (Germany), Phusion IM Ltd (UK); Solution providers: Aveva (UK), Bentley Systems (USA), Jotne EPM Technology (Norway), Epsis (Norway), Eurostep (Sweden), International Business Machines Corporation (IBM, USA), Siemens - Comos Industry Solutions (before Innotec) (Germany), Intergraph (USA), Invenia (Norway), Keel Solution (Denmark), Noumenon (UK), NRX (Canada), Octaga (Norway) and Tektonisk (Norway). In general, the organization holds three membership meetings a year; one in January / February in North-America (typically USA), one in April / May in Europe (typically Norway) and one in October in Asia (typically Malaysia). == Activities and services == === Initiator and custodian of ISO 15926 === In consultation with the other EPISTLE members and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), it was decided in 2003 (some say already in 1997) that for modeling-technical reasons it was better to discontinue the development of ISO 10303 and to initiate the development of ISO 15926 "Integration of life-cycle data for process plants including oil and gas production facilities." Over the years, the scope of the standard has increased from the initial capital-intensive projects in the upstream oil and gas industry, to include also relevant terminology for downstream oil and gas industry applications and to deal with real-time data related to the actual oil and gas production. ISO 15926 has also over the years evolved from a dictionary (a list of terms with definitions), over a taxonomy (added hierarchy) to an ontology (a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts). ISO 15926 is therefore sometimes nicknamed the "Oil and Gas Ontology", for some considered to be an essential prerequisite together with Semantic Web technologies to get to better interoperability, an optimal use of all available data across boundaries and an increase in efficiency. This is what some call the next generation of Integrated Operations. === Reference data services === Placeholders: Flow scheme of WIP - RDS - ISO and role of SIGs RDS Standards in database pilot (ISO) === Special interest groups === Placeholders: Overview of SIGs Drilling and Completion Reservoir and Production Operations and Maintenance == Projects == There are a number of projects (co-)organized by POSC Caesar Association working on the extension of the ISO 15926 standard in different application areas. === Capital intensive projects application domain === The following projects are running at the moment (August 2009): The ADI Project of FIATECH, to build the tools (which will then be made available in the public domain) The IDS Project of POSC Caesar Association, to define product models required for data sheets A joint collaboration project between FIATECH POSC Caesar Association is the ADI-IDS project is the ISO 15926 WIP === Upstream oil and gas industry application domain === The following projects are currently running (August 2009): The Integrated Operations in the High North (IOHN) project is working on extending ISO 15926 to handle real-time data transmission and (pre-)processing to enable the next generation of Integrated Operations. The Environment Web project to include environmental reporting terms and definitions as used in EPIM's EnvironmentWeb in ISO 15926. Finalised projects include: The Integrated Information Platform (IIP) project working on establishing a real-time information pipeline based on open standards. It worked among others on: Daily Drilling Report (DDR) to including all terms and definitions in ISO 15926. This standard became mandatory on February 1, 2008 for reporting on the Norwegian Continental Shelf by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD) and Safety Authority Norway (PSA). NPD says that the quality of the reports has improved considerably since. Daily Production Report (DPR) to including all terms and definitions in ISO 15926. This standard was tested successfully on the Valhall (BP-operated) and Åsgard (StatoilHydro-operated) fields offshore Norway. The terminology and XML schemata developed have also been included in Energistics’ PRODML standard. == Conferences and events == === Semantic Days === === Sogndal academic network meeting === == Collaborations == POSC Caesar is collaborating with a number of standardization bodies, including: Mimosa: collaboration on open information standards for Operations and Maintenance mainly for the downstream oil and gas industry; FIATECH: collaboration on open information standards for life cycle data of capital projects; Energistics: collaboration on information standards for the upstream oil and gas industry, including WITSML and PRODML; OASIS: collaboration on e-business standards; ISO TC184/SC4: the host of the ISO 15926 standard.