OPC Foundation to Make 430+ Companion Specifications Machine-Readable

The OPC Foundation announced on 20 April 2026 that it will convert its full library of more than 430 OPC UA Companion Specifications into formats meant to be read by software rather than by people. The work covers Markdown files, image descriptions, token-optimised retrieval chunks, vector embeddings, and interfaces for Model Context Protocol and REST-based querying. A working prototype already exists in the UA-for-AI-Prototype repository, applying the transformation to the OPC UA core specifications.

Companion Specifications are the part of OPC UA that carries meaning. The base standard defines how to move data and how to structure an address space; a companion specification says what a particular kind of machine exposes and what each node means, so that a robot from one vendor and a robot from another describe themselves the same way. There are hundreds of them, covering machine tools, robotics, weighing, plastics and rubber, packaging, laboratory instruments and much else, and they are published as PDFs.

That format is the reason this matters. Any engineer who has integrated an unfamiliar machine has spent hours searching a specification PDF for the right node, reference or data type. Making the same content addressable by a tool changes that lookup from reading to querying, and makes it realistic to sit an assistant next to an address-space browser during commissioning.

Dr Holger Kenn, who leads the Foundation's AI working group, is quoted saying that agentic AI systems in industrial automation must provide correctness and reliability as good as or better than existing engineering approaches — which is the right bar and a demanding one. Stefan Hoppe, the Foundation's president, describes Companion Specifications as already providing the semantic backbone for interoperable industrial data exchange. The Foundation reports 1,010 members and was founded in 1996.

The signal underneath the announcement is where OPC UA's value now sits. The transport has been settled for years; the differentiation is in the models.