Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Semantic Search Engine for Time-Series Data

It's the year 2014 and there are several updates to the Zymergi Object-Oriented Metadata Search (i.e. a semantic search engine for time-series data).

The first update is that we've moved to HTML5.  This means that we're dropping support for for IE8 or less.  We're proven on the latest versions major web-browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari.

Here's a screenshot of what the search page looks like.  There's no equivalent of "Google Instant" but given the metadata inputted by the administrator into ZOOMS, the software is able to guess what words you are meaning to type:
zymergi zooms search page
The second update is that ZOOMS uses a CSS Framework called, "Bootstrap."  Bootstrap was developed by Twitter and they gave it out for free.  The deal with CSS Frameworks is that someone has already done a lot of the heavy web-page styling.  You just need to customize it a bit to fit your look.

The other thing about Bootstrap is that it is "responsive," meaning the webpage will "respond" differently depending on the size of your screen.  Responsive web design (RWD) refers to whether or not a website is optimized for mobile devices.

No, we aren't wading into the time-series-data on mobile devices.  We actually believe that Transpara has a great product in Visual KPI.   We actually don't expect customers to be using ZOOMS on a phone or tablet on a regular basis, but we acknowledge that it can't be helped; in those cases, you can get your trend data with ZOOMS.  Besides, it came for free, so why not add this value?

The last update is that the entire product has been refactored.  The changes are all under the hood, but we've applied the MVC design pattern to separate the functions for a faster, more technically supportable system.

Below, you see a search engine results page (i.e. SERP) for the search terms inputted above.  ZOOMS tells you exactly which typed words has which meaning:

  • Reactor1 was identified as a unit.
  • Temperature was identified as a parameter.
  • Volume was identified as a parameter.
ZOOMS is figuring out what the typed words mean and combining it into a search result.  In this case, someone looking for the reactor temperature and volume may be interested in a trend with each of these two traces plotted.


zymergi zooms search page


It is by far the fastest way for an untrained individual to get/view time-series data in a process environment.

We'll be disclosing shortly, but in addition to existing features, there are exciting updates in the coming months… like the ability to run without connecting to other data historians (yep, there's going to be an internal one).

Want a test drive?

Sunday, May 4, 2014

The Zymergi Mission

Zymergi sees a world where there is greater wealth than today: a world where individuals have more time to spend on what they want (rather than what they must to do).

appliances Look around the house. Chances are, there's a clothes washer/dryer. The washer is a reactor/centrifuge combination; the dryer is a tumbler... chemical processing units. Now, you don't have to waste time at the river with a washboard washing your clothes.

Oh, there's a fridge and freezer? That's refrigeration process with replete with compressor, expansion valve and working fluid and now you can store foods longer and not have to salt your foods or waste time on extra trips to the grocery store.

Gotta a car, too? That's the chemical processing unit where you convert hydrocarbon to CO2 + water, heat to work to get from point A to B. Now you can get to that job 40 miles away in 40 minutes instead of 8 hours.

appliances The time you get back is possible because of these chemical processes. And these chemical processes are executed by these machines (i.e. "units"). And when you look beyond the symbols of wealth (which happen to be fancier units like yachts and airplanes and sports cars), you realize that the wealthy have limitless time for leisure, while the poor do not. No truer words were spoken when they invented the phrase, "Time is money."

Zymergi thinks the path to creating more wealth for us, our customers, and their customers is to help people who run chemical processes better "see" what their units are doing and get more out of them. The easier it is to "get data," the more time our customers get to "understand the process." And the more process understanding, the greater ability to change the course of the process for greater profitability.

The world where machines do more work means a world where humans have more leisure. Automation is the answer.

Even the world of Star Trek, where does this time...
...to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before
come from?

They (the crew) are enabled by the Starship Enterprise. The starship is simply a plant that manufactures light-years. What runs the enterprise? A "computer" that is simply the starship's SCADA. Again: automation systems.

In virtually every scenario of the future we want to live in, automation... units... chemical processes are there enabling humans to have more time... more leisure.   This future of greater time and wealth is the Zymergi Vision.

The Zymergi Mission: the relentless pursuit of excellence in systems integration and automation software is the straight-line that you can draw from our reality today to our vision of tomorrow.