NIST HELPING THE ELECTRONICS INDUSTRY SPEAK A COMMON LANGUAGE.

At industry's request, NIST hosted an implementers workshop on e-dictionaries for the electronics industry in September 2000. As the electronics industry moves to electronic commerce of components and larger subsystems (e.g., printed circuit assemblies) via the Internet, there is a critical need for common, online terminology to describe electronic components (i.e., a dictionary) that can be integrated with Business-to-Business (B2B) applications. This is necessary for users of electronic components to intelligently and efficiently compare similar components from competing manufacturers, reducing the cost and design time for printed circuit assemblies. According to the IPC (Association Connecting Electronics Industries), approximately 70% of a printed circuit assembly cost is the components on the board.

During the workshop, NIST researchers demonstrated converting two dictionaries into the Electronic Component Technical Dictionary (ECTD) standard format. NIST has been working with the Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2), and the RosettaNet consortia to develop the ECTD standard. ECTD is an XML-based open standard that allows representing a technical dictionary in a computer-sensible form. There are many dictionaries used by the electronics industry for specialized domains which contain overlaps with other dictionaries. Representing dictionaries in a common format is the first step toward minimizing the overlap between dictionaries and establishing a mechanism for managing an inter-national network of e-dictionaries.