DEEP DIVE · CAPABILITY 01
There is no Level 2 without a Domain.
Every plant that gets past point analytics gets there the same way: one connected model of the whole operation that people, analytics, and AI reason over together. That model is the Domain — and it is the difference between buying another tool and building toward autonomy.
- Level 2Level 2 — by definition — is a unified asset and domain model with orchestration across it.
- One graphA typed knowledge graph of your physical and digital world, and the single source of truth everything else in Foundation reads
- It compoundsPoint tools accumulate cost; the Domain accumulates capability.
- Data residencyEach Domain can run on its own databases — graph, timeseries, documents — a direct answer to data-residency requirements for regulated operators.
Why point tools plateau
Every point solution arrives with its own private miniature of your plant — its own asset list, its own tag mapping, its own idea of what a pump is. Buy ten tools and you own ten disagreeing miniatures and the integration seams between them. The seams are where autonomy fails: no tool can reason past its own edge, so plant-wide questions stay unanswered no matter how many models you add. That is the Level 1 plateau, and the industry has spent a decade on it.
Level 2 — by definition — is a unified asset and domain model with orchestration across it. Not a bigger dashboard. A different architecture.
SIX MINIATURES VS ONE GRAPH
What the Domain is
A typed knowledge graph of your physical and digital world, and the single source of truth everything else in Foundation reads:
- Assets and hierarchies
- the plant's structure, from site to unit to equipment.
- Sensors as pointers, not silos.
- A sensor in the Domain points to its series wherever it lives — which is how one graph spans heterogeneous stores, historians, and sites without moving the data first.
- Models and computes, attached where they belong
- every analysis knows exactly which assets it reasons about, and every asset knows what reasons about it.
- Documents, tied to equipment
- the manual and the machine, connected (see the Documents deep dive).
- Templates with real inheritance.
- Model one vessel or one turbine with typed, validated attributes; onboard the next ten in one step. The graph grows by stamping, not re-drawing.
Each Domain can run on its own databases — graph, timeseries, documents — a direct answer to data-residency requirements for regulated operators.
Why AI needs it
A language model without grounding is a liability in a plant. The Domain is the grounding: it scopes every question to real assets, resolves "the export compressor" to the actual equipment with its actual sensors, carries the permissions of the person asking, and gives every answer a place to cite. This is the context layer that turns "AI in the plant" from a demo risk into an operational tool — and it is why Foundation's agents and MCP interface can be trusted with live operations data.
Point tools accumulate cost; the Domain accumulates capability.
Why it compounds
The Domain is the asset that appreciates. Every use case you build enriches it — new sensors mapped, new computes attached, new documents tied — and every later use case starts further ahead because of it. Point tools accumulate cost; the Domain accumulates capability. It is also what the higher levels stand on: Level 3's always-on monitoring reasons over it, and Level 4's envelopes are defined against it. Skip it and there is nothing to climb.
What it looks like in practice
Built and maintained in Foundation Studio: a visual graph editor with global search, template-from-asset creation, live connection health, and diagnostics across the whole graph. Exportable and importable whole — one call moves a Domain between environments.