Multimedia data management for process control

Future process control systems will incorporate multimedia information, bringing a sense of visual reality into the control room and providing more effective communication using a richer vocabulary of media. We outline several new advanced techniques of ongoing research for organizing, managing, browsing, and filtering integrated process control data to support the needs of next-generation applications in the area of process control. We propose a layered multimedia process control data model with the goal of providing a coherent and seamless integration of multiple views on process objects. Direct data access is achieved through semi-automated hyperlinking of graphical and textual data sources. Automatic pre-fetching and retrieval of pertinent data is based on knowledge of the process, the current task-at-hand, and anticipated information needs. And advanced visual communication capabilities with dynamic image annotation bring more effective communication to the process control system