Tagging

This article explains tagging and tag groups, how these can be used to distinguish sites, devices and sensors, and how these are used in logic sharing.

 

Tagging Overview

Tags are additional pieces of information that can be applied to sites or equipment to help connect, group, filter and manage data. Tags are essentially pieces of metadata that can be attached to objects.

Tagging convention is usually a matter of policy or personal preference. The following will, however, discuss a few key features of tagging in the Platform to help users determine the best approaches to tagging their portfolio.

 

Tagging Structure

There are two tagging elements on the Platform – ‘tags’ and ‘tag groups.’

 

Tags

Tags are simply pieces of metadata that can be attached to objects in the Platform.

 

Tag Groups

Tag groups are containers for tags, and all tags are organized into tag groups.

For example, a user wants to tag a series of points from a VAV with the 'VAV' name. To do this, the user would create a tag group called 'VAV', and then add the tag 'VAV01' under the tag group by tagging the points with it. They could then tag another VAV, calling it 'VAV02', under the same tag group.

Figure 23. Tags and Tag Group.

 

Tagging Levels

There are 3 levels of tagging in the Platform:

Site	for assigning details specific to a site (e.g. region, capacity).
Device	for equipment grouping (e.g. AHUs, VAVs, Chillers).
Sensor	for template grouping (e.g. Type, Function, Parent Equipment).

 

Cascading Tags in the Data Hierarchy

As described in the introduction, the Platform stores data in four main nested categories. These are:

 

Portfolio → Site → Device → Sensor

 

‘Tag cascading’ means that if a tag is applied to a parent item, it will also be applied to all of its children items.

Please note that after a site or device is tagged, the corresponding tags must be cascaded for use at the sensor level. This process can take 15 - 30 minutes to complete on larger integrations of 10,000 points or more.

 

Using Tags as an Equipment Grouping Tool

As described earlier in this document, imported points may not always be grouped by equipment type (i.e. VAV, AHU, Fan, etc.). Sometimes multiple pieces of equipment are grouped under one controller and the Platform won’t be able to automatically separate the points without additional information.

To avoid this issue, users should define their equipment by applying 'Equipment Type' and 'Equipment Name' tags. This way, users remain in complete control over the grouping of their imported points.

This doesn’t mean manually tagging each point, as the process can still be conducted algorithmically. It is recommended that users control equipment grouping through tags however. The exact format of these tags is up each user, but a typical example is shown below.

The following table shows a typical device import for a BACnet/IP site (blue columns). Please note that there are multiple pieces of equipment within this device (dev:50001).

Figure 25. Point Import and Applied Tags.

 

To distinguish the equipment, a tag under the 'Equipment Type' tag group was applied, further dividing the points list by creating a tag group for each individual type of equipment.

Based on this tagging, three unique pieces of equipment are distinguished from one controller (VAV01, VAV02, FAN01).

Note that while the 'Equipment Type' tag group isn't strictly necessary in order to separate out the equipment, it does allow a higher level of filtering when analyzing the data in other parts of the Platform.

 

The Tag-Analytics relationship

Logic should run over a collection of points; for example, the 'Space Temperature' and 'Space Temperature Setpoint' points of a VAV box. As discussed above, the way to create collections of points is through the use of tags.

Users must tag points so that they form collections of points that can be evaluated by logic. The most common collection of points for logic to evaluate is equipment; for example, evaluating whether a VAV box is supplying air at the target temperature. As discussed above, equipment is simply a collection of points defined by tags.

Logic relies on tags to identify equipment (or other user-defined groupings) - incomplete tagging will result in incomplete logic deployment later on.