What I (don’t) like about UNS
Some random thoughts on what I encounter when discussing Unified Namespace things
Okay, hear me out: this is not going to be one of those “UNS is dead / UNS will save us all” types of articles. But I do feel the need to share a few thoughts. Let’s call it… a small therapy session.
Also, quick note before we dive in: things might go a bit quieter on our side for a few weeks as we are working hard on new content and have a couple of deadlines to make.
We also just wrapped up our last ITOT.Academy group of 2025: 40 students, a ton of insights, and more digital whiteboard stickies than we ever imagined.
When we asked, “How likely would you be to recommend the Academy to your colleagues?”, we got a heartwarming ⭐ 9 out of 10 ⭐ (and on the question, “How likely would you recommend our blog” even 9.6 out of 10 😍 !!!)
Thank you to everyone who joined. You were brilliant.
How Many Hands Go Up?
Whenever I’m giving a talk, I like to do a quick experiment.
“Raise your hand if you’ve heard of a Unified Namespace.”
On average, half the room does. In some audiences, closer to 75%. So far so good.
Then I ask:
“Keep your hand up if you’ve actually implemented one.”
That’s when the hands disappear. Maybe one or two remain: a few brave (or lost) souls.
Yet every single week, I find myself in multiple meetings explaining the concept again. It’s clearly on everyone’s radar, but it’s also clearly misunderstood.
When we asked our ITOT.Academy students the same question, the results were interesting.
In our European group, almost everyone “knew a thing or two” about it.
In our North American group, several had real hands-on experience.
(And yes, those yellow post-its on the screenshot are the real answers, I just removed the names to protect the innocent.)
The Big Question: What Problem Are We Actually Solving?
About a year ago, I published my first article on UNS. It was an attempt to define something that seemed both very simple and somehow mystical.
I described it like this:
It made sense at the time. But I’ve come to dislike my own definition.
Why? Because it doesn’t match reality.
A central broker works great for vast IoT landscapes or maybe in some greenfield SCADA cases. But in most brownfield factories? Not so much.
The “as it is right now” part (meaning the broker holds only the latest value) sounds nice, but it ignores that you still need somewhere to store, govern, and manage historical data.
And the “depicting data in context” bit? That’s just… data management. It’s ontology building, ISA-95, ISA-88, metadata modeling… Things we’ve been doing for years.
What bothers me is how the UNS conversation often turns into a tooling discussion, as if it’s a product you can buy and tick off your list. It’s not.
In the Academy, Willem and myself also asked to define the UNS to our students and categorize them in more technical topics and organizational ones:
But if we then turned the question around and asked the group: “what are your current blockers”, well… all of a sudden, most problems shifted from technical to organizational:
Who defines the use cases
Not being able to bring people across the organization together
Operations: not really interested at all, but should own the model (what’s in it for them)
Not considering how to scale beyond the pilot scope
Etc…
Context Is the Real Hero
Let’s step back for a second.
Context is what anchors digital data to the physical world. It’s what turns numbers into meaning. It’s the difference between “Tag_1254 = 83.2” and “Temperature of reactor #3 is 83.2°C during batch 24.”
Creating that context means integrating data sources: combining information from process historians (sensor data), MES systems (batches, recipes, shifts), and ERP systems (orders, customers, traceability).
That’s where the magic happens, when data stops being random telemetry and starts becoming information people can actually use.
Without that, you’re stuck in spreadsheet purgatory: copy-pasting, renaming, and trying to remember what “L15.B1.T01A.PV” means. (Hint: Unless you are an operator and have been working in that facility for some years, you’ll forget by next Monday.)
Updating My Definition
So, after dozens of conversations (and a fair number of rants), I’ve rewritten my own definition:
In other words:
It’s not a product.
It’s not a protocol.
It’s a way of thinking about how data flows and how it stays meaningful over time.
Recently, I also published V2 of the Industrial Dataplatform Capability Map. One of the things you can find in this article (near the end) is a mapping of the core UNS concepts to the full list of capabilities needed. In short: It’s about improving connectivity on the edge, contextualizing the data and making it available in a broker. But as you can see on the map itself, that is only a very small part of the work.
The Good, the Bad, and the Governance
🙂 What I like about the interest in UNS:
It’s bringing data management back into fashion — even if people don’t realize that’s what they’re actually doing.
It’s pushing companies away from point-to-point spaghetti towards something centralized and more scalable.
It’s reviving open, secure, and scalable protocols like MQTT and OPC UA (which, believe me, is long overdue…)
😣 What I don’t like about the current UNS narrative:
It’s become too technology- and protocol-focused, missing the bigger governance picture.
Modeling is treated like an afterthought, when in reality it’s the hardest and most important part.
Many implementations stop at a simple, linear ISA-95 hierarchy — which is cute, but nowhere near the complexity of a real ISA-95/88 ontology. (Trust me, those relationships don’t fit neatly in a tree.)
Now, don’t get me wrong…
I’m still a big fan of the idea, when approached the right way.
We have the technology.
What we’re missing is discipline.
Because at the end of the day, this isn’t about brokers, topics, or payloads.
It’s about data governance.
Without that, even the most beautifully architected UNS will eventually turn into just another ball of technical debt
If you’ve been following our work, you know our fictional bakery, Sweet Harmony Treats, has made its way into quite a few of our articles and Academy sessions.
So here’s the fun part: I’m teaming up with Kudzai Manditereza (who you might remember from our MQTT vs OPC-UA episode) to build a demo UNS for Sweet Harmony Treats using HiveMQ.
We’ll make it tangible, show what works (and what doesn’t) and probably break a few things along the way.
Stay tuned. It’s going to be a good one.
And in the meantime:
Keep your data structured, your context rich, and your definitions humble.
Signed,
Your truly 😂
/End of therapy for this week
Hi David,
I have considered reaching out to you on this topic, since I have actually implemented a successful UNS implementation and would like to share the concept with you.