Enabling IoT Ecosystems through Platform Interoperability

Abstract

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is comprised of vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and need to adapt to the platform-specific API and information models. Having to do these efforts for each platform often outweighs the possible gains for application developers to adapt their applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and currently prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. This article presents the work of the BIG IoT project that aims at igniting an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platform Initiative (IoT EPI). We introduce an architectural model for IoT ecosystems, and highlight five common interoperability patterns that need to be supported for enabling cross-platform interoperability and establishing successful IoT ecosystems.

An Ontology-Based Framework for Describing Discoverable Data Services

“…To show the feasibility of our framework, together with the suitability of current UML/OCL reasoners to solve the matching problem, we have conducted some experiments with real data-services developed in the BIG IoT Project [1], where we participate and that has motivated the ideas proposed in this paper.…”

“…Regarding the context of IoT, the current proposals that we know for semantically describing IoT sensors to enable their discovery are not fully automatic [17,1,18]. The approach presented in [17] is meant for helping human users to find their desired semantically-described sensors through a GUI and, thus, it implements manual discovery.…”

“…The approach presented in [17] is meant for helping human users to find their desired semantically-described sensors through a GUI and, thus, it implements manual discovery. In the case of [1], and despite pursuing automatic discovery, for the moment its unique way to describe the input/output relation is by means of a single tag annotation, so, its discovery process is reduced to checking the coincidence of such tag, which is a syntactic check rather than a semantic one. On the other side, the proposal in [18], although it can be fully automated, is in essence based on selecting sensors according to non-functional criteria (e.g.…”

“…Additionally, smart objects can also be interested in consuming data coming from other external data-services, so that they can use it to take their smart decisions. This idea is being currently exploted in several european projects like, for instance, the BIG IoT European project [1].…”

Towards semantic interoperability in an open IoT ecosystem for connected vehicle services

“…The layer below the semantic models is responsible for the definition of messaging interfaces and supporting the abstraction of smart things. Past and ongoing initiatives for this layer are, for example, IoT-A 6 , the OGC SensorThings API 7 , and the BIGIoT API [13]. The open messaging standards called Open-Messaging Interface (O-MI) 8 and Open-Data Format (O-DF) 9 are used in the open ecosystem to achieve interoperability on the application layer.…”