Terminology¶

This section introduces the major concepts for EnOS IoT Hub.

Model¶

A model, or thing model, is the abstraction of the features of an object that is connected to the IoT. The model defines the features of the object’s attributes, measure points, services, and events.

For more information, see Thing Model. A model can be associated to multiple products.

Product¶

A product is a collection of devices with the same features. The product enables you to manage a collection of devices that are derived from the same model but differ in terms of deployment.

Based on the model, a product further defines the communication specifications for the device to connect to the IoT, such as the secure authentication mechanism and data format. For example, collection A and collection B might be deployed in different network environments, and therefore requires the device telemetry to be transmitted in different formats. Different formats require different bandwidths, for example, binary data can save up to 75% bandwidth compared to JSON.

Device¶

A device is the instance of a product. A device is created from a product so that it inherits not only the features defined by the model, but also the communication features, for example, the device key-secret pair and device certificate used for secure communication.

Asset¶

An asset is the instance of a model. An asset is created from a model so that it inherits features defined by the model.

An asset can be:

A single device, such as an inverter.
A group of devices, such as a wind farm. The model of a wind farm might, for example, define two measurement points: the overall active power and cumulative power generation of the site. However the data of the 2 measurement points are not obtained directly like how it is done for single devices, but calculated using the aggregation of all devices in the site. In this case, the site does not need to have the device key-secret pair for site-level connection.

A device is an asset, but an asset is not necessarily a device. For more information, see Asset Tree.