Glossary
The words, explained simply.
Terms that come up in fire safety, building systems and the software behind them — written for people who need to make decisions, not pass an exam.
Fire safety
- Addressable fire panel
- A fire alarm control panel where each connected device has its own address, so the panel can identify exactly which detector or call point is in alarm.
- Older conventional panels report by zone — a whole floor or wing — leaving responders to search for the source. Addressable systems report the individual device, which shortens response time and makes remote monitoring far more useful because events carry precise location.
- FACP
- Fire Alarm Control Panel — the certified controller that monitors detectors and initiates alarms.
- The FACP is the authority in a fire system. Monitoring and building-management integrations read its state; they should never issue commands to it, because its certified behaviour is what the building's life-safety approval depends on.
- Trouble signal
- A fault condition reported by a fire panel — such as a disconnected device, a wiring fault or a low battery — that is not an alarm but requires attention.
- Trouble signals matter operationally because they indicate a system that is partially blind. A detector in trouble is not protecting its area. Estates with many sites often accumulate unnoticed trouble conditions, which is one of the strongest arguments for unified monitoring.
- AMC
- Annual Maintenance Contract — a recurring agreement covering scheduled servicing and support for installed systems.
- For contractors, AMCs are the difference between one-off project revenue and predictable recurring income. Tracking which devices at which sites are under contract, and when each expires, is a common gap in spreadsheet-run businesses.
Building systems
- ELV
- Extra-Low Voltage — the category of building systems operating at low voltage, including fire alarms, CCTV, access control, public address and data networks.
- ELV contractors typically install and maintain several of these systems together. The term is widely used in the Middle East, India and parts of Asia; equivalent work in North America is often described as low-voltage or life-safety and security systems.
- BACnet/IP
- An open building-automation protocol running over standard IP networks, used to exchange structured status data between building systems.
- BACnet describes equipment as objects with properties, which makes integration more self-describing than register-based protocols. It is common in newer installations and in building management system integrations.
- Modbus TCP
- A simple, widely supported industrial protocol that exposes device data as numbered registers over Ethernet.
- Modbus is straightforward to implement but carries no inherent meaning: interpreting register values depends on the manufacturer's register map. Accurate mapping is usually the bulk of a Modbus integration effort.
- Edge gateway
- A small computer installed at a site that talks to local equipment in its native protocols and forwards normalized data to a central system.
- Gateways solve two problems at once: protocol translation, and network safety. By initiating outbound connections rather than accepting inbound ones, a gateway lets a site be monitored remotely without exposing anything to the internet.
- Outbound-only topology
- A network design where site equipment initiates all connections outward, so no inbound ports need to be opened at the site.
- This is the preferred pattern for remote monitoring of sensitive infrastructure. From the internet's perspective there is nothing listening at the building, which removes an entire class of attack surface as an estate scales.
- VMS
- Visitor Management System — software that registers visitors, notifies hosts, issues badges and maintains a record of who was on site.
- Modern systems extend beyond people to vehicles and contractors, and their main long-term value is the searchable audit trail rather than the speed of check-in.
Software
- Read-only architecture
- A system design in which the software has no mechanism to write or send commands to the equipment it monitors.
- The distinction from a permission setting is important: read-only architecture means the capability does not exist in the code, so it cannot be enabled by configuration, mistake or compromise. In life-safety monitoring this is the difference between a safe integration and a risk.
- Multi-tenancy
- A software design where one running system serves multiple separate customers, with each customer's data isolated from the others.
- Multi-tenancy keeps operating costs low and updates uniform, but it makes isolation critical. The strongest implementations enforce separation in the database itself rather than trusting application code to filter correctly.
- Row-level security
- A PostgreSQL feature that enforces which rows a given user can see or modify at the database level, independent of application code.
- Because the rule lives in the database, a bug in the application cannot leak another tenant's data — the query simply returns nothing. This is the mechanism behind credible tenant isolation claims in multi-tenant SaaS.
- Offline-first
- Software designed so that full functionality is available with no network connection, rather than treating offline as a degraded fallback.
- In offline-first systems the local device holds authoritative data and all operations complete locally. Synchronisation, where it exists, is optional and secondary — which is what makes the software dependable at sites with poor connectivity.
- WebSocket
- A persistent two-way connection between a browser and a server, used to push updates instantly instead of waiting for the page to poll.
- For monitoring dashboards this is what makes sub-second alarm delivery possible, and it is also what lets one operator's acknowledgement appear immediately on every other operator's screen.
- PPE detection
- Computer vision that checks whether workers are wearing required protective equipment, such as helmets or high-visibility vests.
- Used as a safety-culture tool rather than a punitive one, it flags unsafe conditions in real time on sites where a supervisor cannot watch every area continuously.
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