A DataSet can be thought of as a list of name and value pairs representing an Event or a list of Variable Values.

A DataSet can be created from an Event or from a sample of Variable Values. The configuration of this application-data collector is called PublishedDataSet. DataSet fields can be defined to represent any information, for example, they could be internal Variables in the Publisher, Events from the Publisher or collected by the Publisher, network data, or data from sub-devices.

DataSetMetaData described in 5.2.3 defines the structure and content of a DataSet.

For publishing, a DataSet will be encoded into a DataSetMessage. One or more DataSetMessages are combined to form the payload of a NetworkMessage.

Figure 3 illustrates the use of DataSets for publishing.

Figure 3 – DataSet in the process of publishing

A PublishedDataSet is similar to either an Event MonitoredItem or a list of data MonitoredItems in the Client Server Subscription model. Similar to an Event MonitoredItem, a PublishedDataSet can select a list of Event fields. Similar to data MonitoredItems, the PublishedDataSet can contain a list of Variables.

A DataSet does not define the mechanism to encode, secure and transport it. A DataSetWriter handles the creation of a DataSetMessage for a DataSet. The DataSetWriter contains settings for the encoding and transport of a DataSetMessage. Most of these settings depend on the selected Message Oriented Middleware.

The configuration of DataSets and the way the data is obtained for publishing can be configured using the PubSub configuration model defined in 8.2 or with vendor-specific configuration tools.