Glossary¶
This article lists and explains special terminology used throughout this documentation in alphabetical order.
Analysis function¶
An analysis function is a generic function to determine a specific analysis output. An analysis function takes arbitrary many pins of a component data model and variable time spans as inputs. An analysis function can be designed for a specific component or be applicable on several components.
Attribute¶
An attribute is a generic placeholder for meta data of a component data model. An attribute is used to map a meta data value to an instanced component within a specific project. Attributes are designed in analogy to tags.
Automation network¶
The automation network locally connects different devices within a building or plant. In most cases, the automation network is a dedicated physical wired network such as an Ethernet but can also be wireless or virtual.
Building¶
A physical building, i.e., an office, a factory, a hotel, and so forth. This term is often used synonymously with project despite being a special case of a project.
Company¶
The top-most entity on the aedifion.io platform mapping to a real-world or virtual company. Companies represent strictly separated administration realms on the aedifion.io platform: All resources such as users, projects, datapoints, and so forth belong to exactly one company and are never shared between two companies.
Component¶
A component is a physical or virtual object or system in a building, plant, district and so forth such as an automation device, valve, heat pump, room etc. A component may be an aggregation of several components. In general, a component is part of an automation or monitoring system and therefore has varying numbers of datapoints measuring, describing or influencing the state of the component.
Component data model¶
A component data model is a generic data model of a component. It can support an arbitrary number of pins and tags for metadata.
Datapoint¶
A sensor, actor, or other physical or virtual data source. A datapoint belongs to exactly one project. It emits observations that form the time series of this datapoint.
Datapoint key¶
Datapoint keys define how datapoints are named and allow providing alternate names such as translations to different languages or names that adhere to standardized formats such as BUDO. The standard datapoint key is called aedifion-fully-qualified-datapointname, comprising the device name, datapoint name, datapoint type and instance id.
Device¶
A physical building automation device, e.g., a programmable logic controller, connected to a building automation network, e.g., via BACnet or Modbus.
Instanced component¶
An instanced component is a component data model instanced for a specific project and it is associated to exactly one project. The pins of the component data model it is instanced from may be mapped to the datapoints of the project. Meta data tags may be added to an instanced component to further individualize it.
Mapping¶
Mapping is the process of individualizing an instanced component. It includes the linking of a datapoint and thus its time series of a project with a pin and parametrizing attributes with meta data.
Measurement¶
Strictly speaking a special case of an observation but mostly used synonymously.
Observation¶
A concrete value emitted by a certain datapoint. An observation may be actually measured or artificially generated, e.g., through a simulation. An observation is always tagged with a time stamp and may have further tags.
Pin¶
A pin is a generic placeholder for a datapoint within a component data model. A pin is used to map a datapoint and its time series to an instanced componentwithin a specific project.
Plant¶
Plant summarizes all locally connected entities of automation hardware, sensors and actors. In many cases, it is synonymously used with building automation system, energy system or building energy system.
Project¶
A logical entity that corresponds to an administrative subdomain in a company, bundling instanced components, datapoints, and roles. In most cases, a project corresponds to an actual building or larger device but may also represent a simulation or a static data set.
Role¶
A role is a bundle of permissions that define and limit resource-access company- or project-wide. A special "admin" role with all permissions is created automatically for each company and project.
Tag¶
A short piece of information that can be attached to an instanced component or datapoint. A tag has a key and a value, e.g., unit=degreeCelsius or writable=False.
Time series¶
A list of (time stamp, observation)-tuples measured for a certain datapoint.
Time stamp¶
A certain date and time usually in RFC3339-format, e.g., 2018-11-11T11:11:11+01:00.
User¶
An account on the aedifion.io platform corresponding to a real person. A user always belongs to exactly one company.