datamodel

Now we are potentially getting right in amongst the weeds and many a data model gets stuck in the weeds because this issue is not understood.

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, hard disks and memory were small and really expensive. In 1969 the computer that landed man on the moon only had 4k of RAM and 72k of ‘disk’ (ROM) storage.

Having the best datamodel in the world won’t help you grow your digital capabilities if the only way to access it is through proprietary drivers.

Google search is not a validated datamodel. Nor is it comprehensive, but it’s good enough for most of us.

“A well structured class library allows you to build applications that are portable across different assets. They overcome the problems of different naming conventions across assets or sites.”

Trying to model humans is probably the easiest way I know to break an inflexible model. Why? Because humans are recursive – that means they keep repeating the same thing and also they keep changing the rules! Humans start off as a child and become parents, they form relationships with each other, they marry each other and they can now change gender. If you designed your database schema in the 1500’s you would have had to rebuild it several times since!

The problem with hierarchies is they are subjective and only relevant to a certain viewpoint or problem. For example, what is the hierarchy of equipment on an industrial facility? Should it be based on area or on equipment size, or on position in the process?

Every Digital Twin needs a data model somewhere inside it. The Data Model is the digital map of where everything is; it’s the central reference for how everything is connected; it’s the search engine for your information.