OPC-UA Information Modeling for IIoT: Beyond Simple Tag Reads [2026 Guide]
· 10 min read
If you've spent any time polling PLC tags over EtherNet/IP or reading Modbus registers, you've felt the pain: flat address spaces, no self-description, and zero standardized semantics. Register 40001 on one chiller means something completely different on another vendor's dryer. You end up maintaining sprawling JSON configuration files that map register addresses to human-readable names, data types, element counts, and polling intervals — for every single device variant.
OPC-UA was designed to solve exactly this problem. But most guides treat it as an abstract specification. This article breaks down what actually matters when you're building industrial IoT infrastructure that needs to talk to real equipment.