Tag Naming Conventions

Modeling & Naming

A component of MIS - Management Information System

One question:

Choose a device in your system.

Can you isolate all points associated with that device?

If the answer is no, maybe, or not all the phases, or not all units of measure, then you have an inconsistent System or Historian naming convention. Why is this bad? Until you fix this problem, it will be an obstacle to maximizing your capital investments and will prevent the comprehensive data mining and visualization that drives today's utilities.

This common problem is the legacy of staff turnover and changes in system ownership. Without a documented naming convention there is no pattern to follow. Inconsistencies in naming are a huge impediment to querying archives by device, unit of measure, or other groupings such as phase. 

Linguistic models for a unique solution

Using insight from the speech recognition industry, ASCE developed a naming standard which breaks names into units of meaning which are easy to isolate. This linguistic modeling has several benefits and helps structure a truly unique solution to this common problem.

By imposing consistency in naming and grouping, devices can easily be isolated by type, class and other characteristics such as phase and current.

ASCE has developed algorithms and code which can be applied to fix these naming inconsistencies by pattern matching, which leaves the archive uniform. Once renamed, ASCE's search and replace software substitutes the new names for the old throughout entire directories of display files at a swap and replace rate of 50 per second using the power of Microsoft's .net libraries. So even hundreds of displays can be relinked to the new names in a short period of time without the risk of human error incurred when rebuilding the displays by hand. ASCE can rename within large databases using generated SQL code, with the same benefits and limitation of risk.

Benefits of Object and Device Naming

All downstream data mining done with telemetry data archives benefits from conventions which establish class of device, phase, unit of measure and other characteristics.