A system for providing access to locally stored process image data to other devices in an industrial production environment, the system comprising: a plurality of controller devices, wherein each respective controller device comprises: a volatile computer-readable storage medium comprising a process image area; a non-volatile computer-readable storage medium; a control program configured to provide operating instructions to a production unit; an input/output component configured to update the process image area during each scan cycle or upon the occurrence of one or more events with process image data items associated with the production unit; and a historian component configured to locally store the process image data items of the process image area as time series data in the non-volatile computer-readable storage medium; and a process image backbone providing the plurality of controller devices with uniform access to the process image data items of each controller device, wherein the process image backbone comprises a plurality of process image backbone instances, each process image backbone instance being located on one of the plurality of controller devices, and the process image backbone instance located on each controller device includes a data registry comprising one or more objects semantically describing the process image data items stored on the controller device, the data registry providing a list of process image data items available in the controller device, and a messaging component for communicating data from the data registry over the process image backbone, the controller device being able to respond to tag browser requests from other controller devices by providing the data registry file or a portion thereof, the controller device being configured to parse the data registry file and return an appropriate subset of the overall file, if a controller device only requests a certain portion of the data registry. a volatile computer-readable storage medium comprising a process image area; a non-volatile computer-readable storage medium; a control program configured to provide operating instructions to a production unit; an input/output component configured to update the process image area during each scan cycle or upon the occurrence of one or more events with process image data items associated with the production unit; and a historian component configured to locally store the process image data items of the process image area as time series data in the non-volatile computer-readable storage medium; and a process image backbone providing the plurality of controller devices with uniform access to the process image data items of each controller device, wherein the process image backbone comprises a plurality of process image backbone instances, each process image backbone instance being located on one of the plurality of controller devices, and the process image backbone instance located on each controller device includes a data registry comprising one or more objects semantically describing the process image data items stored on the controller device, the data registry providing a list of process image data items available in the controller device, and a messaging component for communicating data from the data registry over the process image backbone, the controller device being able to respond to tag browser requests from other controller devices by providing the data registry file or a portion thereof, the controller device being configured to parse the data registry file and return an appropriate subset of the overall file, if a controller device only requests a certain portion of the data registry.