Hotspotting for Plant & Process — Linking Every View for Humans and AI

The Challenge: Data Locked in Separate Worlds

For decades, plant and process teams have relied on two essential, but disconnected, views of their assets:

• 2D schematics that capture system logic, flow, and connectivity, and
• 3D models that represent the physical world.

Each view tells a different story — but until now, they’ve struggled to speak the same language. The result: engineers spend countless hours reconciling tags, tracing lines, and cross-referencing data sources to answer simple questions like “Where exactly is this valve?” or “What else depends on this sensor?”

The Solution: Explicit Links, Automated Scale

Nextspace’s new Plant & Process Hotspotting framework changes that.
It creates explicit, bidirectional links between 2D schematics, 3D models, and the underlying data attributes and documents that describe each asset.

In this workflow:

• Every tag, object, and data point becomes part of a unified ontology.
• Navigation works both ways — click a pump in the 3D model to locate its control logic in the 2D schematic, or start from a P&ID tag to jump directly to the corresponding 3D geometry.
• The same framework scales automatically: supporting automated ingestion, feature recognition, and the latest scan data formats (including Gaussian splats) to handle entire facilities, not just single assets.

The Foundation: Ontology-Driven Digital Twins

What makes this possible is the ontology-driven data structure underpinning every Nextspace digital twin.
Rather than connecting files or formats, we connect meaning — how components relate, behave, and depend on each other. This enables a single source of truth that unifies design, operations, and maintenance data.

The outcome isn’t just visualization — it’s understanding.
With explicit links and shared context, both humans and AI systems can navigate across disciplines and data types seamlessly.

Why It Matters

For asset-intensive industries, the payoff is immediate:

• Faster engineering validation — no more hunting between drawings and models.
• Smarter automation and AI — unified data structures enable advanced analytics and predictive reasoning.
• Confidence at scale — automated processes ensure consistency across entire portfolios.

Plant & Process Hotspotting represents another step toward the true digital twin — one that connects every view, every format, and every system through ontology, creating a foundation for continuous improvement and intelligent operations.

Read more about our ontology-first approach:‍

‍Why Data Contextualization Matters Before AI

‍‍From Digital Twins to Knowledge Twins‍‍

Ontology vs File Federation

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