Glossary
Industrial DX terms without the fog.
Short definitions for the concepts that shape Digital Transformation and Industry 4.0 architecture.
Digital TransformationThe movement from Industry 3.0 operating patterns toward Industry 4.0 operating patterns. In manufacturing, it changes how the organization sees, learns, decides, and improves.Deep dive →
Industry 4.0Connected assets, contextualized data, interoperability, and adaptive operations. It is an operating pattern, not a product category.Deep dive →
Industry 5.0The European Commission's framing for the next phase: Industry 4.0 foundations redirected toward human-centricity, resilience, and sustainability.Deep dive →
Digital PlatformThe technical foundation of DX: connect and collect; contextualize and normalize; expose and share the now; expose and share the past.Deep dive →
UNSUnified Namespace: a governed, event-driven information space where systems publish and consume contextualized industrial data.Deep dive →
MTRMinimum Technical Requirements: Edge Driven, Report by Exception, Open Architecture, and Lightweight.Deep dive →
Data ContextualizationAttaching meaning to raw signals — asset, hierarchy, units, quality, operating state — so people and software can interpret them without tribal knowledge.Deep dive →
MOMManufacturing Operations Management: the Level 3 capability family for production, quality, maintenance, inventory, scheduling, execution, performance, and genealogy.
MESManufacturing Execution System. MES products can implement parts of MOM, but MES is not the whole Digital Platform.
ISA-95 / IEC 62264A useful framework for manufacturing operations and enterprise-control system integration. It supports architecture language; it does not replace business value or platform design.Deep dive →
Purdue ModelA reference model used for current-state understanding and security segmentation. It should not become a target point-to-point integration architecture.
MQTTA lightweight publish-subscribe protocol often used for event-driven industrial data movement.
SparkplugAn MQTT-oriented specification that adds industrial payload, state, and birth/death behavior for operational data.Deep dive →
OPC UAAn industrial interoperability standard used for structured access to automation data and models.
HistorianA time-series system that stores industrial process data for trends, analysis, reporting, and operational evidence.
Industrial DataOpsThe practice of connecting, modeling, transforming, governing, and serving industrial data so it becomes useful to people, systems, analytics, and AI.
Industrial AIAI applied to industrial decisions and workflows. It depends on contextualized, governed, accessible data plus oversight and safety controls.Deep dive →