Smartplant Data Model

Hi Again,

In the last post, I discussed a little about data modeling and tried to co-relate it to Smartplant. But after reading it several times, I myself found it disgusting. It never cleared any point. Here, I'm trying to make it more clear.

Smartplant Schema

As we all know, Smartplant tools talk to each other via adapters. Of course, SPF acts as an interpreter. But for SPF to understand the tools, it itself needs a medium. To interpret the data of each tool, there are several schemas that are stored in xml files. There several dlls that parse these xml files for SPF. The tool adapter interfaces with schema component to read the Smartplant schema.

Smartplant Schema Rules

Smartplant Suite deals with heterogeneous data.  In order to control the data transfer in disciplined way, following rules are applied.

• ·         Smartplant Schema consists of all schema data, and describes everything that goes to SPF.
• ·         The Server contains a copy of Smartplant Schema, which actually is an xml file.
• ·         Clients contain the selective extracts of Smartplant Schema, known as Component Schema.
• ·         The changes to be done are first done in Smartplant Schema and then propagated to Component Schema.

Overview of Smartplant schema Data Model

The Smartplant Data Model consists of three main components. These are represented using UML (will discuss about it some time).

Component	Representation	Defined by
Classes	Represents real world objects	ClassDefs
Interfaces	Used to tightly bind roles	InterfaceDefs
Relationships	Represents the association between two objects	RelDefs

Hope this was more clear for understanding modeling.

Happy Smartplanting...