Applications are often built on top of other applications, inheriting data and features from all of the underlying layers. The foundation for all applications is referred to as “the VTS layer”.

•    Visual Tag System™ (VTS™) provides the tools that developers require to build impressive, powerful, and functional operator interfaces for monitoring and control systems that can be adapted to work with any industry from food and beverage processing to oil and gas, nuclear, fossil, and hydro power.

•    VTScada is a specialized VTS application that has been tailored towards users in the water and waste water industry. Because of its diverse and robust features, customers have also used it as the basis for applications designed for a wide range of industries

In addition to all of the standard tools and features of VTS, VTScada users have access to tools, graphics, and pages that have been designed for ease of use and for rapid, virtually automatic application development.

Because VTScada is a custom layer that is built on VTS, it has access to all of VTS's powerful application configuration tools, and has been additionally fitted with graphics, specialized tags, and pages designed to work with water and wastewater systems.

The following image illustrates the inheritance relationship between VTS and VTScada.

As shown here, the VTS layer provides developers with all of the standard features of VTS. The VTScada layer then adds to (and in some cases overrides) these standard features. For example, in addition to having an Alarm page, Historical Data Viewer page, a Reports page, and an Operator Notes page, a VTScada application also has station pages, a Communications Data page, and a Call-out List page. A VTScada application also contains tags that supplement those in the VTS layer.

Built on top of the VTScada layer, the end-user application (known as the "application layer") inherits features from both the core VTS layer and the VTScada layer.