By  Mario Ishikawa and Alexandre Patrus Many digital transformation actors are not yet familiar with Unified Namespace. Also abbreviated as UNS, this term was coined by Walker Reynolds, president of 4.0 Solutions, to designate a concept that allows real-time processing and traffic of contextualized, normalized, and aggregated information. Therefore, the UNS is neither a product nor a system, but a central tool for the Industry 4.0 scenario. And in this article we will explain why. It is very common for people to think that there is no data collection and processing problem in their companies, because the Industry 3.0 and factory automation scenario already works with data collection. However, when we talk abou Industry 4.0, we are talking about a much larger amount of equipment connected to a plant's network. And the UNS comes to help enabling the scalability of your digital transformation strategy. Industry 3.0 x Industry 4.0: what are the main differences in data flow? In this example, we can see a typical Industry 3.0 scenario: data flows in one direction only. It goes from the sensors to the PLCs, from the PLCs to the SCADA or MES systems, and sometimes also to the ERP.…