Glossary

device

With regard to the Niagara network, a device is an object that fulfills a particular purpose. A device may be a physical mechanical or electrical component, such as a BACnet device, or it may be a software object, such as a station, oBIX server. What actually comprises a device may depend on your design and levels of abstraction.

Devices can provide or accept different types of data and they may contain metadata, such as device ID, Model, or serial number of the device itself.

DIBS

Distributed Internet Backup System

job

The mechanism used to manage a task that a station performs. Jobs run asynchronously in the background while providing user visibility regarding what is going on in the station. See also, provisioning job.

ORD

An ORD is an “Object Resolution Descriptor”. The ORD is the Niagara universal identification system and is used throughout the framework. The ORD unifies and standardizes access to all information. It is designed to combine different naming systems into a single string and has the advantage of being parsable by a host of public APIs.

worker

A programming term for a system process or thread, which is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that an operating system can manage independently using a scheduler.