Governance & Standards Bodies The organizations behind OPC and the broader industrial automation space play a direct role in how these specifications are developed, certified, and maintained. This section covers [...]
Reliable industrial communication depends on more than choosing the right protocol — it depends on bandwidth, latency, redundancy, and the safeguards built around data quality. This section covers the terms [...]
OPC UA is one of several protocols used in industrial communication, and it's often deployed alongside, or compared to, others. This section outlines the most common alternative and complementary protocols [...]
Some of the technology underneath OPC, particularly OPC Classic, predates or still runs alongside OPC UA. This section covers the legacy and underlying technologies, from DCOM to common data formats, [...]
OPC rarely operates in isolation — it sits at the intersection of plant-floor control systems and broader IT/OT integration. This section covers the surrounding systems and roles, such as SCADA, [...]
OPC UA was designed with security built into the specification rather than added on afterward, relying on certificates, encryption, and configurable security policies to protect data in transit. These terms [...]
Beyond the data model, OPC UA defines how clients and servers actually communicate — sessions, subscriptions, discovery, and the intervals that control how often data updates. This section also covers [...]
OPC UA's flexibility comes from its data modeling system, but that system introduces a vocabulary of its own — Nodes, Namespaces, Address Spaces, and the types that define them. These [...]
This section covers the core OPC and OPC UA specifications themselves — the standards published by the OPC Foundation that define how industrial systems exchange real-time data, historical data, alarms, [...]
