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The Fieldbus Foundation is an organization dedicated to a single international, interoperable fieldbus standard. It was established in September 1994 by a merger of WorldFIP North America and the Interoperable Systems Project (ISP). According to their site, the Fieldbus foundation is a not-for-profit corporation that consists of more than 350 of the world's suppliers and end users of process control and manufacturing automation products. Working together, these companies have made contributions to the IEC/ISA fieldbus standards development. Unlike proprietary network protocols, FOUNDATION fieldbus is not owned by any individual company, or controlled by a single nation or regulatory body. Foundation strives to design an open, interoperable [fieldbus] that is based on the International Organization for Standardization's Open Systems Interconnection (OSI/ISO) seven-layer communications model. The FOUNDATION specification is compatible with the officially sanctioned SP50 standards project of the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society (ISA) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
