Cognite Data Fusion Release: February 2023

We’re excited to share the highlights of the February 2023 release of Cognite Data Fusion. Continuing on the theme from the December release, we’ve made substantial improvements to searching and exploring data in Cognite Data Fusion. We’re also improving our support for document annotations, working with data transformations, and launching a major update of our enhanced data modeling features. For an overview of the release, watch the release spotlight video below. 

Before we go into the details of the February release, remember that you can always post feedback and product ideas right here on Cognite Hub. We also recommend checking out our blog for the latest on the trends and thinking that are shaping the future trajectory of our product.

Improvements to Data search, Document browsing, and 3D exploration

It's easier to apply filters to your search, filtering on multiple values within the same filter and combining multiple filters to narrow down your search. When you look at the search results, the results view is more customizable, offering you to select, sort, and change the layout of the columns displayed in the search results.

When you’re viewing documents in Cognite Data Fusion, we’ve added support for a large range of common file formats, which now display natively in the document viewer. This includes text files, JSON files, spreadsheets, documents, and slides.  You’ll also find a new  option of laying out multiple documents in the same viewer. This is in particular useful when reading engineering diagrams, as these documents often break across pages or documents. Now, you can view them side-by-side to trace the flow of a connection. Using our contextualized engineering diagrams makes it trivial to open and view the next document from a connection exiting the page you are viewing and gives a holistic view of the system. 

Tip! These views can easily be bookmarked and shared with others to make recall and collaboration easier.

Adding and consuming annotations enrich and power up the contents in engineering diagrams and other industry documents. We’re now shipping a unified Annotations API to make it easier to work with these annotations across all documents in Cognite Data Fusion. This will enable 3rd party applications to create and consume annotations, and the annotations will be visible inside Cognite Data Fusion. Over the next few months, we will transition all of our own applications to make use of this API, ensuring consistent views of documents across our entire product portfolio.

The final major improvement made to data exploration in Cognite Data Fusion is to add support for viewing 360-degree images in the data explorer. You can view these images  in isolation or in the context of a point cloud or CAD/BIM model, providing a “street view”-experience where you can walk around your site or asset in high-fidelity imagery, making it easy to understand physical details and relationships without physically visiting the facility.

Connectivity improvements - Files and Energy data platform

This release sees the addition of improved connectivity for ingesting files into Cognite Data Fusion. Documents, diagrams, and files are almost always a key supplementary source of information to enrich and contextualize the digital twin in Cognite Data Fusion. Making it easier to ingest these makes it easier to leverage our new exploration and viewing capabilities. We’re now shipping a file extractor that supports local server file systems, several network sharing protocols, like FTP and SFTP, SharePoint, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob storage. The extractor is easy to set up and automatically detects file formats and ensures the proper processing pipeline. 

We’re also shipping a public Beta version of an extractor for data platforms adhering to the OSDU Open Group specification. Commonly seen in the Energy sector, OSDU data platforms are a great initiative to standardize structure and formats for key data categories. Use the new Cognite OSDU extractor It is now easy to connect to and extract data from OSDU platforms to Cognite Data Fusion, where the data  can be further contextualized and blended into a richer industrial digital twin to enable new use cases and applications.

Data transformation - Usability improvements

Previously, setting up data transformations in Cognite Data Fusion required some knowledge of SQL to express the transformation logic. With the February release, we’re adding a simple drag and drop interface to set up simple mappings between properties without resorting to writing SQL code. You’ll’ get automated suggestions to simplify the mapping process. Writing full SQL is still possible, and the interface now supports auto-completion and numerous other tweaks to make this experience easier.

Enhanced data modeling - Beta update

We’ve written a lot about our new and enhanced data modeling capabilities. February sees us publish what we believe to be the last Beta update of this capability. Based on user feedback from Beta customers, and internal validation, we now think the February update is feature complete. What remains between now and the General Availability  release is additional testing, validation and hardening of the product to ensure we can consistently meet our SLA across the wide variety of use cases we will enable for you. Our enhanced data modeling capabilities allow you to model any kind of industry domain, from well-known industry standard data models to whatever you need to enable your applications and solutions. Read more about these capabilities in this press release. 

Cognite InRobot Early Adopter Program

We are thrilled to announce we have launched the Cognite InRobot Early Adopter Program. Here you are invited to accelerate your robotics adoption to automate your work processes. You can find the group here, we hope you’ll request to join if this is of interest to you. 

InRobot is a powerful application that enables you to configure and deploy your robots in an efficient and effective manner. With InRobot, you have the ability to remotely control, plan, and execute a wide range of robotics missions, including the automatic capturing of street views, the execution of autonomous visual operator rounds, and capture data for monitoring conditions of equipment.

You get the same benefits from robots using InRobot, like increased frequency and repetition of data capture at your site, in addition, to reduce the number of hours that workers spend in the field, thereby increasing the overall safety of your operations. With InRobot all data is properly linked in Cognite Data Fusion thereby enhancing your understanding your plant and potentially the risk picture.

We hope you find some of these updates useful and valuable. If you have any feedback or ideas, we’d love to hear from you right here on Cognite Hub.