Main Entity Types for REST API

When using the REST API, there are several different Entity Types, the User may come across.

• Customers - the customer is a separate business entity: an individual or organization who uses tenant devices and/or assets; the Customer may have multiple users and millions of devices and/or assets;

• Sub-Customers - analog to Customer, but aligned under the Parent Customer. Can also have Sub-Customers and Users (infinite Multi-Tenancy)

• Users - users are able to browse dashboards and manage entities;

• Assets - abstract IoT entities that may be related to other devices and assets. In Cital Eco System, we use Asset as Entity Type for: Activation and Metadata Objects.

• Asset Profile - each Asset has an Asset Profile. This Defines the Type of the Asset. For example, every Metadata Object (Asset) belongs to a Metadata Category (Asset Profile).

• Entity Views - Those are the Devices for representation to the customers. They offer different Keys depending on the Sensor Type and Time Window depending on Subscription Period.

Each entity supports:

• Attributes - those are key-value pairs associated with entities. For example, each Metadata Asset Object has a serial number, model, and firmware version;

• Time-series data - time-series data points available for storage, querying and visualization. For example, temperature, humidity, and battery level;

• Relations - directed connections to other entities. For example, contains, manages, owns, and produces.

ER Diagram

This diagram depicts the most relevant Entity Types, their Attributes and Identification Features in Cital Eco System.

Please be aware, that we left out attributes and objects that are not relevant for Customers to lower the risk of confusion and to make the entrance into this Entity Model easier.

UML Flow Diagram

This diagram depicts the Flow of Entity Types and how each Entity Type connects to another in Cital Eco System.

Please be aware, that we left out attributes and objects that are not relevant for Customers to lower the risk of confusion and to make the entrance into this Entity Model easier.

The diagram depicts the relationships between the Customer, Child_customer, User, Asset, Entity_view, Entity_relation, and Timeseries_data and attributes entities.

Each Customer entity is related to many User entities, and each User entity is related to many Asset and Entity_view entities.  Furthermore, each Customer entity can have many Child_customer entities, which are also related to many User entities.

The Asset and Entity_view entities are related to each other through the Entity_relation entity, which represents the relationship between an Asset and an Entity_view entity. An Entity_relation entity can be related to many Asset entities, but each Asset can only be related to one Entity_relation entity.

Finally, the Entity_view is related to the Timeseries_data and Attributes, which represents the time-series data and attributes associated with an Entity_view. Entity_view can be related to many Timeseries_data and Attributes records.

Based on this diagram, we can see relations which we can use in such scenarios:

1. Working with activation assets: users can find their activation assets, and using entity relation get entity views related to these activations.

2. Get time series data and attributes: user can find entity_view and use entity_view id to get time-series data.