The Path from Data to Actionable Information as a Driver for the Industrial Ecosystem
There are standards that are used to collect
raw data from manufacturing systems.
These are often highly deterministic field bus
technology such as EtherCat 7 , Profibus 8 or
Modbus 9 . The data in these standards have
Some standards provide a syntactic
structure, one of the most common in the
manufacturing space is OPC/UA 10 . It
provides an abstract information model that
allows for a common structure and syntax of
the data with grouping and tagging.
Syntactic transformation should be done at
this stage to prevent having to provide some
initial interpretation before it gains meaning.
The syntactic stage can sometimes be
indiscernible from the following semantic
stage if one combines the semantics into a
single functional step, such as transferring
from the raw data to OPC/UA with the
MTConnect semantic model layered on top.
There is still an intermediate syntax that
must be created, but it may not be visible to
the user of the data.
Figure 2: Linear A Script
little to no syntax, so another layer is
required to interpret the data and combine
registers