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.