Hi Lukasz, even in protocols like ADS and EIP at Rivian everyone is referring to any data point as a “Tag”. So far, I haven’t come across a single person saying something else on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6994584721582088192
And keep in mind: PLC4X is meant to be the bridge between IT and OT, and we chose a lot of stuff (Like the address patterns, etc.) to match the OT expectations. After all, I will most probably be an IT person asking the OT person: Please give me the address for Field/Tag XYZ. So, I think naming it “Tag” would be better. I would like to name it to match the most used term: I know that this isn’t always a perfect match in all protocols, but I guess that’s the difference between providing a “shared API” or building individual drivers for each protocol. And currently we name it “Query” in Go … so you currently say: “AddQuery” instead of “AddField”. Chris From: Łukasz Dywicki <[email protected]> Date: Sunday, 6. November 2022 at 11:45 To: [email protected] <[email protected]>, Christofer Dutz <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Rename Fields -> Tags? Hey Chris, I am not certain if "tag" is standardized or not. Earlier, knowing only modbus registers and bacnet objects, I been confused multiple times what the tag is. For regular IT tag is rather a marker placed on something to categorize elements. Our field currently specifies rather a unique data point than a tag. If tag meaning comes from IEC standard then I'd opt in for a change. If its not standardized then I'd advice staying with a field. Our use is mixed IT/OT (with probably still more IT?), if we stick too much to automation industry terminology then we will need to bake definition of a tag, fight situations where we miss a "common understanding" cause we can't beg others for unification of their meaning. I've seen tag used in context of ethernet/ip (more precisely Rockwell PLCs), but haven't done a research of why. Keep in mind we have also object oriented protocols such as BACnet (with `device.object.property`) and CANopen (with `device.sdo` or `device.tpdo..`) thus in their context tag is far less meaningful than field. Cheers, Łukasz On 5.11.2022 12:23, Christofer Dutz wrote: > Hi all, > > I’m currently working on harmonizing our different API variants a bit and > hopefully finalizing our Browse API (Which sort of wen’t through multiple > levels of change between Java and Go, back to Java and now back to Go. > > One thing I learned at Rivian is, that everyone seems to be talking about > “Tags” on PLCs. So I asked on LinkedIn and it seems pretty obvious that “Tag” > seems to be the term mostly used in the automation industry. > > So, I would like to consequently rename “Field” to “Tag”. > > What do you folks think? > > Chris >
