What Is MultiSpeak?
The MultiSpeak® Initiative is a collaboration of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), leading software vendors supplying the utility market, and utilities. The Initiative has developed and continues to expand a specification that defines standardized interfaces among software applications commonly used by electric utilities. The MultiSpeak specification thus helps vendors and utilities develop interfaces so that software products from different suppliers can interoperate without requiring the development of extensive custom interfaces.
Originally targeted at small electric utilities and covering a limited number of back-office applications [Brief History of MultiSpeak], the effort has expanded to where it now offers significant guidance for a range of applications to utilities of all sizes, primarily those that supply electricity, but increasingly for those that supply water and gas services as well. [What Does MultiSpeak Cover?].
The MultiSpeak specification defines what data need to be exchanged between software applications in order to support the business processes commonly applied at utilities. In order to accomplish this, it makes use of three components:
- Definitions of common data semantics. Data semantics are an agreement about a specific item used in a business process, say a customer or a service outage, which might be exchanged in the context of the outage management business process. Data semantics are documented in the form of an extensible markup language (XML) schema.
- Definitions of message structure. Once an agreement has been reached on what data need to be exchanged, it is necessary to define message structures to support the required data interchanges. In MultiSpeak, the XML-formatted data payload is carried as part of a web services call for real time exchanges and as part of a batch file for off-line transfers.
- Definition of which messages are required to support specific business process steps. Web services method calls are linked together to accomplish each potential step in a utility business process. Such steps can then be strung together to support complete business processes.
Real time MultiSpeak interfaces use web services to define and implement the data transport. Each web service consists of one or more methods. MultiSpeak uses Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files to document the methods and define which messages are required to achieve the goals of each method.
MultiSpeak defines interfaces to support common utility business processes. To date 33 interfaces have been defined in the MultiSpeak Specification [What Does MultiSpeak Cover?].