FINtastic Tip: Why Tagging is Important

We recently caught up with Senior Application Engineer Aaron Sanchez to get some insight into common questions he hears as a member of our customer success team. While he faces a variety of questions, one of the most common ones is: "Why do we need to tag and what is the purpose of tagging?" Here's what he had to say.

We often hear about the importance of big data and how tagging helps customers find the information they're looking for. In my role, tagging is very much about operational efficiencies and helping to engineer projects faster. 

In typical building automation software the role of the application engineer is to basically create a digital representation of the real world by creating a database of points and equipment. Legacy software provided the tools to create the graphics, summaries, control logic, and other applications but each individual device or controller gets engineered individually. 

This is where tagging comes in. By adding metadata when defining the points in the software, they automatically bind to other applications dynamically, such as point graphics, equipment graphics, and summaries. This also applies to control logic, fault detection diagnostics, and smart alarms. Even better, when there are multiple similar equipments in a project, the tagging supports relativizing, which means a one-to-many payoff. 

For example, an application engineer will typically integrate some BACnet devices, controlling, AHUs and VAVs. They would model the data in the database and then manually link those points to the graphics, the summaries, and the control logic. For typical equipment, they would duplicate and re-link the data to the second, third... When we tag our data, the first step is all we need to do and with FIN, all the rest of the linking happens automatically. Finally, if a project is expanded for a second building or floor, literally the only work that needs to be done is the integration to the database. Control routines, alarms, and even the navigation simply appear because it was already engineered for the floor - all because of tags. 

So now you know: tagging is more than finding data. It's about getting things done efficiently and effortlessly.  Learn more about the payoffs of tagging here. Learn more about how this works in FIN Framework here.