OPC Dictionary: Terms, Acronyms & Definitions

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,