Point Labeling¶

After creating equipment instances for a type of equipment using the extraction tool, the next step is to identify standard points for that equipment type and associate the relevant labels.

Point tagging entails matching between two lists of points -- one being a list of standardized points for the equipment type; and other being the list of points available from the controller or BACnet gateway. Normal includes standard points lists for many equipment types, so once the equipment type is created, a preliminary points list is available. As part of the system modeling process, the user may customize the points list for a particular piece of equipment by adding or removing points.

You can edit the desired list of points on an equipment type either when initially creating the Equipment Type during the extraction phase; or by editing the type on the Equipment Entity page.

Using the Equipment Entity Page¶

The Equipment Entity page for a particular piece of equipment provides an overview of all instances of that equipment type. By expanding a specific piece of equipment, the user can browse points lists for that instance, including access to a subset of properties, real-time data, and other useful pieces of information.

In addition to displaying equipment entities, the Entity Page allows the user to

• Edit the entity definition, by clicking the "Edit Entity" button in the top-right. This allows the editing of the desired points list and potential attributes after equipment extraction.
• Find instance with or without certain points; the strip above the table of entities contains a concise summary of how many instance have points which each type of label. In the example below, for instance, there are three instances with the THRMEN (thermal energy) point; and one instance without it. Using the filter select box, it's easy to find and correct missing data.

Applying Labels to Individual Points¶

If there is only one instance of that equipment type or if the different pieces of equipment are very different, the user may directly add or remove class labels to points from this screen simply by clicking the "Add Class" button on the relevant point and finding an appropriate label.

Applying Labels in Bulk¶

In many cases, there may be tens or hundreds of basically identical pieces of equipment; which makes tagging them individually impractical. In this situation, use the "Point Tagging" tray, available by clicking in the top right.

The bulk tagging tray allows the user to group and filter points across pieces of equipment so as to quickly group and label points by various attributes. In order to tag all of the points on a controller, the user should identify groups of points which receive the same label. There are a few different ways to automatically group points, one of which generally works well:

• Text Search: if all of the points of a particular type contain a common substring like Temperature, typing that in the search box will filter the list for just those points. They can then be selected all together, and tagged by finding the appropriate point label in the left-handed lists.
• Exact Grouping: points can be grouped by one of their attributes by selecting the "Exact" group mode, and then a column to group on. This works well if one of the columns contains text which is essentially the point label, even if it is not normalized.
• Fuzzy Grouping: point names often contain a "true" point label, combined with other information about the point. This is particularly common for BACnet gateways where many devices are exposed through a single device; for instance, you may have RoomTemp_001, RoomTemp_002, etc. In this case, exact grouping will not produce the desired results; but "Fuzzy" grouping attempts to find a regular expression which exploits common naming conventions to group points.

Trending Labeled Points¶

The ontology in use may specify a trending policy for labeled points.