[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Tagging Niagara Station Components

By Eric Anderson and Therese Sullivan, Tridium Inc.

It’s time to embrace standardized tagging to save time, achieve better outcomes, and future-proof your work for data analytics, machine-learning, and AI. On Tridium’s part, we are building more support into Niagara Framework® to make it easier and more intuitive for Niagara users to begin systematically tagging all their station components (Figure 1).

Niagara Framework users are a community of experts in the field of designing customized user interfaces for end-users of smart systems and smart buildings. Tagging is a core skill for accommodating the efficient resolving and rendering of graphical components in a customized UI, as well as for preparing a Niagara station for data analytics. With the move toward standardized point tagging pioneered by open-source semantic-web organizations like Project Haystack, the Niagara Community has moved away from bespoke labeling toward these standards. Today, Niagara visualizations can be driven by tag-based bindings with tags pulled from multiple custom tag dictionaries, as well as from the Project Haystack standard.

This article is about how Niagara users can configure tag dictionaries for easy reuse and faster overall deployment of a tagged project. It will cover how to imply tags and to deploy tags at-scale across projects. With the right tips and tactics, you can make light-work of the job of tagging your Niagara station components.

Figure 1. Introduced in Niagara4.0, Niagara entity query language (NEQL) made it possible to search for tags within Niagara stations. With every subsequent release, the Niagara development team has made tagging easier to comprehend, deploy and use.

To read this whitepaper about tagging Niagara components using standard dictionaries and ontologies, click through here: https://www.tridium.com/content/dam/tridium/en/documents/document-lists/2021-0020%20Niagara%20Tagging%20Whitepaper%20May%202021.pdf

To view a TridiumTalk videocast that covers these topics, click through here: https://www.tridium.com/us/en/services-support/events/2021/03/2021-03-04-tagging-in-niagara

If you would like to review a presentation that gets more specific on the topics of the NHaystack module and Niagara’s Haystack Tag Dictionary, you can watch my session from Haystack Connect 2021, along with others from the conference by clicking through here: https://www.haystackconnect.org/schedule/

Summary

Since the Niagara Framework is tag-agnostic, users have the utmost flexibility when applying tags to Niagara stations and building systems. The result is visualizations that are reusable and manufacturer- and equipment-agnostic. Tag-based bindings streamline on-site efficiency, save time and provide more flexibility when deploying graphic templates on new and existing Niagara stations.

About the Authors

Eric Anderson, a Software Engineer, has been working on tagging and tag hierarchies since he joined Tridium in 2015. Tridium created and continues to enhance the Niagara Framework®, an open platform that facilitates system integration and control.

Therese Sullivan is Director of Marketing at Tridium. Therese has written extensively on the convergence of IT/OT and the Buildings IoT.  She is a former editor of Haystack Connections and is a Contributing Editor for AutomatedBuildings.com.