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NTCIP 1104 - Center-to-Center Naming Convention Specification
This Fact Sheet was written on Sep 15, 2009. The status of the standard at the time was: Approved.
This Fact Sheet was written on September 15, 2009.
The status of the standard at the time was:
Published in May 2008.
This Fact Sheet was last verified on October 09, 2009
Check the ITS Standards Search to see if there has been subsequent development activity.
Overview
The National Transportation Communications for Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) Protocol (NTCIP) is a family of standards that provides both the rules for communicating (called protocols) and the vocabulary (called objects) necessary to allow electronic traffic control equipment from different manufacturers to operate with each other as a system. The NTCIP is the first set of standards for the transportation industry that allows traffic control systems to be built using a "mix and match" approach with equipment from different manufacturers. Therefore, NTCIP standards reduce the need for reliance on specific equipment vendors and customized one-of-a-kind software. To assure both manufacturer and user community support, NTCIP is a joint product of the National Electronics Manufacturers Association (NEMA), the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), and the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE). More information concerning the NTCIP family of standards and their related documents is available in the NTCIP 9001 - NTCIP Guide, available on-line at (www.ntcip.org).
Prior to the establishment of NTCIP, traffic management centers used a number of proprietary protocols to exchange information with other transportation centers. The goal of all NTCIP standards including the information level NTCIP 1104 - Center-to-Center Naming Convention Specification, is to identify a common set of non-proprietary communications protocols that address requirements for center-to-center communications and promote interoperability.
What are these standards for?
This standard, NTCIP 1104 - Center-to-Center Naming Convention Specification, provides a standard way for transportation management centers to uniquely name entities for which data are exchanged with other centers. Such entities can include centers, field devices, incidents, personnel and vehicles. Unique names are important to avoid ambiguity and confusion when information is exchanged between centers about these entities.
Who uses them?
This standard, NTCIP 1104 - Center-to-Center Naming Convention Specification, should be used by transportation and traffic engineers involved with the design, specification, selection, procurement and installation, operation, and maintenance of NTCIP center-to-center communications. NTCIP center-to-center hardware and software designers and application (computer program) developers should find this standard especially relevant to their efforts.
How are they used?
This standard, NTCIP 1104 - Center-to-Center Naming Convention Specification, defines how a Center Domain Name is structured to uniquely identify each center. It also defines an object name hierarchy analogous to a file system tree and similar to an Internet URL (Uniform Resource Locator). This hierarchy is referred to as the object’s naming context and is one branch in the name space occupied by all the names within the collection of communicating centers. There are some sections of this standard that refer to the CORBA center-to-center protocol standard (NTCIP 2305). Based on feedback from the transportation community, the FHWA and SDOs have decided not to pursue further development of the Common Object Reference Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard.
This standard defines entity naming within the context of using one of the Center-to-Center (C2C) protocol standards. Currently the two C2C protocol standards are NTCIP 2304 Application Profile for DATEX-ASN (AP-DATEX) and NTCIP 2306 Application Profile for eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Message Encoding and Transport in ITS Center-to-Center Communications (C2C XML).
Scope
Communications between a transportation management center’s central computer and other centers necessitates a common naming hierarchy for identification of entities such as centers, field devices, incidents, personnel and vehicles. This is accomplished by using the naming structure defined in NTCIP 1104 - Center-to-Center Naming Convention Specification. The naming structure defines the order of specific fields used to uniquely name a given ITS entity. Further standardization within a region is necessary for the exact field name definition within the naming hierarchy.
Related documents
The following ITS standards should be considered when using this standard:
- NTCIP 9001 - The NTCIP Guide
- NTCIP 2304 - Application Profile for DATEX-ASN (AP-DATEX)
- NTCIP 8003 - Profile Framework
- NTCIP 2306 - Application Profile for XML Message Encoding and Transport in ITS Center-to-Center Communications (C2C XML)
The following standard, while not part of the ITS standards, should also be considered when using this standard:
How to obtain Standards
- https://www.ntcip.org/document-numbers-and-status/ Phone:
N/A
Information about this standard and other NTICP standards is available on the NTCIP document numbers and status page.
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