Many of the NTCIP standards have Management Information Bases
(MIBs). The standard MIBs are used by equipment manufacturers, system
integrators, and agencies that deploy NTCIP-conforming equipment. Electronic
versions of the MIBs are available from a NEMA FTP site. To get access to the
FTP site, send your name, organization name, and email address to
ntcip@nema.org, and request access.
WHAT'S A MIB? Many of the NTCIP standard documents contain sections of text
that look like a computer program. In fact, for the standards with "Object
Definitions ..." in their title, the largest part of the standard is the
computer text. (For example, in TS 3.5 -- see Section 2; the computer program
part goes on for 70 pages!)
This "computer text" is called a Management Information Base, or MIB. The MIB
describes the organization of a database that will be created in the memory area
of the computers where it's installed. The MIB databases will be used to store
information, which in turn will be used to control the traffic signals and other
devices in a transportation management system.
The MIB is a text document that can be read by a human and "compiled" by a
computer. "Compiled" means converted from readable form into the special
instruction language used by a computer. For NTCIP transporation management
systems to work, the computer applications will need to reference many MIB
databases.
It is the customary practice on the Internet to make electronic text files
containing the MIB text available for free. After all, trying to implement
these standards is not a typing test to see if you can re-create all of the
lines of text in the MIB!
For the NTCIP MIBs, NEMA makes the files available on a password-protected FTP
site. FTP is the File Transfer Protocol, which is an application that's used
to move files between computers. The FTP site can also be accessed using a WWW
browser.
| Return to NTCIP home page | This site last updated May 11, 2008 |
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