An environmental control system controls monitoring and operation of a
multiplicity of disparate environmental control devices by determining an
appropriate configuration for each control device and communicates
corresponding monitoring and control commands to each device in
accordance with its corresponding communication protocol over a selected
I/O port. An operational instruction set includes a structural definition
of an enterprise facility in which devices are defined by personality
modules and communicate with a system host in accordance with a protocol
defined in a protocol module. Facility implementation is defined by a
node tree structure which collects suitable protocol nodes under a
corresponding I/O interface port node. Device (personality) nodes are
collected under corresponding protocol nodes, and data point nodes depend
from their corresponding device nodes. Data points nodes are individually
accessible by merely traversing the node tree using a URL-like notational
structure, allowing off-site users to control and monitor environmental
devices by issuing commands in the form of a URL.