OrdinateDB

Platform · Visualisation

SPEC 09

No gauges. No 3D pies. No decoration between you and the data.

Honest rendering is not a style guide someone can override — it is what the components are capable of drawing. Trends, small multiples and horizon charts where they earn their place; gaps rendered as gaps; quality shown as quality.

Honest by construction

SPEC 09 §7

If the collector was down, the trend has a hole in it.

There is no gauge component, no pie in any dimension, no gradient fills, no chart junk to switch off — the honest defaults are the only defaults. Missing data is never interpolated over: a gap renders as a gap, with the affected span marked, and degraded quality renders in the quality colour rather than being quietly averaged into respectability.

The vocabulary is small and earns its keep: trends, small multiples for comparing a fleet, horizon charts where dozens of series must share a wall. Nothing is animated that is not changing.

trend · cr-102 / bearing_temp_c · 24h
gap 04:31–06:12pct_good 92.9%

nothing is drawn across the outage. the display cannot be configured to pretend otherwise.

Three form factors, one definition

SPEC 09 §6

Wall, desktop, handheld — the same display, laid out for the distance it is read from.

A display definition states what matters about an asset; the renderer decides how that reads at four metres on a control-room wall, at arm’s length on an engineering desktop, and on a phone held next to the pump it describes. You do not build the same screen three times, so the three never disagree.

Wall screens run playlists: an ordered rotation of displays with per-display dwell times, managed as configuration rather than a browser tab someone set up in 2019 and nobody dares touch.

playlist · control-room wall 2
01 line-3 overviewdwell 45s
02 utilities · steam & airdwell 30s
03 downtime · last 24hdwell 30s
04 energy · site metersdwell 20s
rotation125s · loops

a playlist is a versioned object. the wall shows what the configuration says, not what was left open.

Model-driven displays

SPEC 09 §3

Displays are generated from templates. Hand-tuning is the exception, and it is tracked.

Because the template already knows an asset’s series, limits and calculations, its display is generated — every pump from the same template gets the same correct screen, and a template change updates the fleet’s displays with it. Where a particular asset genuinely needs a hand-tuned layout, the override is a recorded delta against the generated display, visible in drift tracking rather than silently divergent.

The result is the opposite of the usual historian estate: not hundreds of hand-painted screens, each a little different, but a handful of templates and a list of deliberate exceptions.

Claims about honest rendering are cheap. The live demo runs the real components against synthetic plant data — including the outages.