To provide enhanced search capabilities in a process control system, a knowledge repository is generated that includes both contextual data and time series data. The contextual data organizes process plant-related data according to semantic relations between the process plant-related data and the process plant entities. When a user submits a process plant search query related to process plant entities within a process plant, search results are obtained by identifying a data set from the knowledge repository. The contextual data categorizes process parameters so that users can search for a particular process parameter category. Users can tag previous searches to execute them once again at a later time. Users can also execute queries for predicted or future states of process plant entities, batch queries regarding batch processes, soft sensor analytics and monitoring applications, parameter lifecycle applications, perturbation applications, step testing applications, or batch provisioning and scheduling applications using the knowledge repository.