This month, I was challenged to attend the ProveIt! Conference. To be honest, I resisted attending. We talked about it within the CESMII Leadership Team, and I voted against. I ended-up getting over-ruled by some of our members and prospective members, who thought it would be useful to have a CESMII lens available through which to interpret the event. Everyone else was right, and I was wrong — it was worth attending.

The UNS (Unified Namespace) crowd, largely led by a vocal social media personality, has always had a message kind of similar to ours. If you squint real hard, the effort to Unify a Namespace is directionally the same as creating Smart Manufacturing Profiles for your industrial information. We’ve historically differed on a few key points, though. The UNS approach is often (and incorrectly) functionally tied to a MQTT broker by its practitioners (an interpretation Walker Reynolds does not endorse, by the way!); CESMII would prefer to stay neutral on transport. The UNS approach usually has individual teams unifying their namespace; CESMII would prefer our project teams inherit their conventions from standards, where applicable, and always store their templates in a shareable format. Over the past couple years, pragmatism, and the natural evolution of any data modeling effort, has brought the two viewpoints closer together. Some of the standards-based SM Profiles need to be decomposed to smaller, bite-sized parts in order to make them adoptable. Some of the local-only UNS efforts are finding they need to apply standards in order to scale and become interoperable.

It turns out our Computer Science professors were right all along. While arguably primitive 5 years ago, the UNS approach is maturing naturally into the best practices we’ve been using in IT software development for the past 40 years.

An evolution of UNS thinking, however, does not fully address some of the “softer” challenges of most UNS discussions. Things like a tendency to call out competing ideas as “stupid” and their proponents “idiots” on social media (or on stage) doesn’t work as well with a community like CESMII’s that tries to emphasize mutual respect and collaboration. And to be fair, UNS and its spokespeople have historically engaged with a different kind of audience than CESMII. Friendly commentators call this language “passionate” or “exciting” but such excuses don’t make it easier to process as these different tribes begin to work together…