A field device management system includes an interface which provides communication between a software application implemented on the system and a set of smart field devices coupled to the system. The interface accesses information from and/or writes information to the smart field devices, a database and device descriptions associated with the smart field devices to provide a consistent communication connection with such devices, database and device descriptions, irrespective of the types of smart field devices connected to the system. The interface is based on a predefined hierarchy of categories of information defining the device data associated with the smart field devices, and is implemented using an OLE object for each of the predefined categories of information. In particular, each OLE object stores device data associated with one of the predefined categories of information and includes instructions for communicating with one of the smart field devices, one of the device descriptions and/or the database to effect a command related to the stored device data.