Of the many IoT standards that now exist in the market, one has emerged that is especially adept at addressing the semantic interoperability issue. It’s called oneM2M, which can be applied in various user scenarios including smart cities.
Of the many IoT standards that now exist in the market, one has emerged that is especially adept at addressing the semantic interoperability issue. It’s called oneM2M, which can be applied in various user scenarios including smart cities.
According to Omar Elloumi, Chair of oneM2M’s Technical Plenary, their current specification – Release 2 – contains a number of new developments in order to expand the use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology. “Semantic interoperability, for example, takes the IoT from simply connecting devices to understanding the data being collected,” Elloumi said. “When it comes to the different technologies and vertical industries within the IoT there are multiple languages used. Despite them being similar, it presents a need to decode, or translate, the language. Release 2 achieves that by extracting the data from different devices into the common abstract layer, enabling semantic descriptions to be created.”
Elloumi said that oneM2M deployments are seen across a wide range of scenarios, from enterprise IoT with things like mobile edge computing to consumer technology such as smart watches. He further noted that oneM2M is increasingly deployed in smart city projects.
“Smart cities highlight the need for a horizontal platform, consisting of a common service layer to allow every component to communicate as one system. This enables city planners to sidestep vertical deployments. This is critical for the scalability of smart cities and to support multiple IoT use cases,” Elloumi said. “An open horizontal platform can leverage existing networks, enable the sharing of software across different applications and allow devices with multiple uses.”
It is exactly because of this that oneM2M is especially suitable for the Asia market where smart cities are rapidly developing. “In Korea, an IoT Cluster Project – Busan Global Smart City – facilitates the interoperability of various IoT services based on the oneM2M platform,” Elloumi said. “In a smart city deployment, the oneM2M standard unlocks the ability for various vertical organizations, such as smart utilities, to share data through abstraction and semantic interoperability. As a result, information can be shared between various utility providers in one city to serve the community. In the case of Busan, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning supports the project and encourages the growth of profitable services and the establishment of an IoT ecosystem in the region with the smart city frameworks validated from oneM2M’s global standards. The project involves developing an Open Smart City platform based on oneM2M standards, creating a clear path way for urban services and establishing governance for the operation.
According to Elloumi, oneM2M currently has more than 200 member companies, including major operators, service providers and equipment manufacturers from across the globe.