Retrieving and navigating through manufacturing data from relational and time-series systems by abstracting the source systems into a set of named entities

A computer system including a computer-readable medium including computer-executable instructions for providing a software agent for processing manufacturing information requests wherein the processing comprises the steps of:

• receiving an information request to retrieve information based on a name defined by a configured manufacturing data model;
• in response to the receiving step, relating data coming from one or multiple backend systems and adding context data according to the configured manufacturing data model;
• preparing a result to correspond to format and filtering criteria defined in the information request;
• and
• producing an information response in a normalized format, the information response containing the requested data and context data rendered during the relating step;
• and
• transmitting the response in the normalized format to a requestor.