The Xentara Semantic Model
It is said that data is everywhere, and everything is data. It’s easy to get lost in copious amounts of information. That’s why it’s so important to organize and structure the data in your industrial projects.
Xentara’s Semantic Data Model allows you to create a perfect digital representation of physical systems, then codify and tailor it any way you see fit. With Xentara, you’re never lost in a sea of data!
Build Your Hierarchy
The basic structure of the Xentara Semantic Model is a hierarchical tree. Every object can have any number of child objects, and branches can spread and multiply as needed. Thus, a complete machine can be rebuilt as a digital twin duplicate tracing its internal connections.
Configure Once, Use Often
The Semantic Model is fully object oriented, allowing you to set up components or component groups, data arrays and other structures as templates, then instantiate them as often as needed. Reuse modules and sub-assemblies as parts of different systems. Set up multiple instances of identical or similar machines, then make individual changes as needed.
Turn Data into Information
Raw data is useless if nobody can understand it. So the Semantic Model is constructed to be as human readable as possible. Any Data Point can be assigned as many attributes as needed an can contain unlimited meta information.
You can even build different ontologies for different users. So an engineer can see an exact twin of a device’s interiors, while operators are only presented with driver-facing information. And the Xentara multi-mesh Security Model makes sure you can
Go Global
The Semantic Model is Unicode based, allowing users to create descriptors and metadata in any number of languages. When you ship systems to different countries, it’s a simple switch of a flag to set the default language to local.
This also means HMIs don’t have to be localized manually if the framework pulls names and metadata straight from the Model.
Nerd Stuff: Diving Deeper Into a Layered Architecture
Technically, the Semantic Model as described above is just one of three layers of the Xentara System Model. However, it is the “visible” part as it contains all user data, variables, values and meta information.
Below this Semantic Layer are tasks and processes as well as the I/O structure.
- Semantic Layer (Meta Model): This is where all your data resides.
- Task Layer: This is where microservices and other processes happen. These processes read from and write to the other Layers.
- I/O Layer: This is where most Connectors and drivers live. They can supply data from hardware to the Task or Semantic Layers and vice versa, handling bidirectional I/O.
The part underlaid in grey is an example of a substructure defined as an object. This can be instantiated as often as needed in any part of the system model.
For a full description of the System Model, please visit our advanced developer documentation at docs.xentara.io
