Unified Data Model

One of the most important and innovative concepts of Iotellect is the unified data model. This model is designed for aggregating various data from diverse hardware devices and data sources in a single system by converting data items into a "normalized" representation. Such normalized data can be:

  • Stored in a central database

  • Uniformly processed and routed by various data mining tools

  • Presented, exported and imported using standard components

  • Made available in the integrated visual editors

  • Shared between platform servers

  • Exposed to external systems via diverse APIs

Contexts

The heart of the unified data model is the context tree. It is a hierarchical structure of data containers called contexts.

The purpose of context is to provide unified access to a certain system resource or hardware device.

Each context offers several types of entities: variables, functions, events, and actions. Those entities allow interaction with a context in a standardized way with no respect to the nature of the device or resource represented by it.

Data Tables

Another core concept of the unified data model is a standard data item called Data Table. This is a tabular data structure used for representing:

  • Values of variables

  • Input and output values of functions

  • Data associated with certain event instances

  • Any other pieces of data flowing inside Iotellect

Data Tables are very similar to database tables since they have zero or more rows and several fields of a certain format. Here are several important facts about Data Tables:

  • For the sake of unification, scalar values (numbers, strings, booleans, dates) are represented as single-cell Data Tables, i.e. tables having one row and one field

  • Lists of diverse values are usually represented as single-row tables with multiple fields of different formats, while arrays are better represented by single-field tables with multiple rows

  • If the type of Data Table's field is also Data Table, each cell in this field contains a nested Data Table. There could be an unlimited level of table nesting

  • Data Table format descriptor contains comprehensive information about field types, their meanings, value validation, and presentation rules, cell cross-dependencies, etc.

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