WITS is a group of professionals coming together to develop common standards to the benefit of those who provide, manage and maintain telemetry systems for Water Management Organisations (WMOs). Their first project was to develop an interoperability standard between master stations (collecting data from remote assets) and the field devices which actually monitor those assets.
There were around 80 delegates present at the expo for a full day of interactive sessions and presentations. The purpose of the day was to bring everyone up to speed with the current status of the WITS standard; to discuss user experiences of implementing WITS in their systems; and to discuss the future direction of WITS.
Mark Davison of Terzo presented a realistic picture of the current state of the standard, focusing on some of the criticisms and problem areas levelled at the current standard, and what the committee have been doing to address these.
Terzo had a stand in the expo’s “market” area. We had some interesting discussions with various users about the uptake of WITS, and the challenges of helping large user organisations getting up the learning curve with WITS, especially when they’ve had legacy systems for up to 20 years. We also represented Triangle Microworks, a market-leading software stack developer, based in Raleigh, NC and who we have closely worked with on a number of integration projects.
The last presentation of the day presented a possible next project for WITS – to develop interoperable solutions for the water industry based on IoT technologies such as MQTT. This stirred up quite a bit of interest and enthusiasm – we look forward to seeing how these exciting ideas develop.
Neil Tubman, Terzo Digital, October 2016