OPC UA Updates and Trends

Is your MQTT data losing its meaning in the cloud? Learn how OPC UA preserves critical semantic context for true, secure, and vendor-agnostic IIoT integration.

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Understanding the fundamentals of the OPC UA standard

OPC UA is an open, platform-independent standard for secure and standardized industrial data exchange from sensors to the cloud.

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Exploring the core benefits of using OPC UA

The standard offers platform independence, scalability across use cases, and robust message-based security beyond simple transport layer encryption.

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Using information modeling to add semantic context

OPC UA structures data with semantic context, making it self-describing and easier to use for machine learning and data science applications.

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Understanding the modular and object-oriented architecture

OPC UA's architecture is based on object-oriented principles, allowing for modular components and easy adoption of new transport protocols like MQTT.

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Preserving data integrity with a unified technology stack

Using a single technology like OPC UA across all layers prevents the loss of valuable semantic information that occurs when converting between different protocols.

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Why plain MQTT is insufficient for industrial IoT

Unlike plain MQTT which only defines transport, OPC UA over MQTT standardizes the data payload, ensuring interoperability between different devices and cloud platforms.

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Comparing JSON and binary encoding for payloads

OPC UA supports both human-readable JSON and a highly efficient binary encoding that reduces payload size by 75% and enables message-based security.

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Using standardized messages and flexible topic structures

The standard defines message types for discovery and status monitoring while allowing flexible, user-defined topic trees for actual data transmission.

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How to build domain-agnostic industrial applications

Standardization of application and status information allows developers to create a single solution, like a condition monitoring tool, that works across diverse industries.

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Exploring integration options and the supporting ecosystem

OPC UA over MQTT is supported by major cloud providers, MQTT brokers, and can be integrated natively via SDKs or through standardized gateways.

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A practical demonstration of the IoT starter kit

A walkthrough of the open-source IoT starter kit on GitHub shows how to implement a simple OPC UA publisher and subscriber using .NET.

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Comparing transport versus message-level security models

OPC UA provides end-to-end message-level security, ensuring data is encrypted and protected even from the MQTT broker, unlike standard TLS which only secures the transport.

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Introducing the new OPC Foundation cloud initiative

A new collaborative initiative involving major IT and OT companies aims to drive standards for AI, cloud connectivity, and data spaces in the industrial landscape.