ONVIF recently announced it has reached an agreement with the Open Security and Safety Alliance to take over development of data ontology and metadata specifications. This article looks at why the work is better suited for ONVIF than OSSA.
ONVIF recently
announced it has reached an agreement with the Open Security and Safety Alliance to take over development of data ontology and metadata specifications. This article looks at the rationale behind the agreement and examines why the work is better suited for ONVIF than OSSA.
ONVIF announced the agreement in December last year. The initiative will continue under a new metadata working group within ONVIF. ONVIF is the open industry forum supporting standardized communications between IP-based physical security products.
According to Leo Levit, Chairman of the ONVIF Steering Committee, the ontology work that OSSA embarked upon happens to fit better within the ONVIF development structure.
“It was a joint understanding that the work to specify metadata and the interfaces needed to transfer metadata between different components of a system is more suited to ONVIF than OSSA, due to the tools and processes and the fundamentals ONVIF already has in place to make these specifications successful. The work will benefit ONVIF members and the security industry as a whole,” Levit said.
He stressed that that this was an “isolated topic” that ONVIF took over from OSSA. He also characterized ONVIF’s relationship with OSSA as “complementary.” “We have enjoyed an open dialogue with OSSA since they launched in 2018 and have viewed them as complementary to our mission,” Levis said of OSSA, which is a non-profit collaboration initiative that aims to create a framework outlining a common standardized platform for security and safety solutions.
Significance of the development
Data ontology is a way of interconnecting data that is generated by different sources and in different formats, something that Levit said will “most certainly have value to the future of the security industry.”
“To accomplish this means that we need to continue to refine and expand our current metadata descriptors of an object and make them more unified between the different vendors. This metadata work within ONVIF will provide a stronger foundation for future ontology work and will benefit future steps toward deeper interoperability between different types of sensors,” Levit said.
According to ONVIF, the new metadata working group is focused on developing standardized ways of richly describing the context in which objects of interest appear in captured video. The work will enable the physical security industry to easily share and make use of data generated by analytics applications running on IoT devices, like cameras, for security and analytical purposes.
According to Levit, sharing and making use of this data is not so easy right now. “For example, without a standardized way, it’s difficult to provide temperature information from a thermal sensor to a
surveillance system without an integration,” Levit said.
“With Profile M we are defining a standardized way to communicate certain events and metadata that describes an object, with those descriptions based on a visual identification of the object and the events,” he continued. “When we move to the IoT domain, with different types of sensors, there is a great deal more data that can be collected with sensors and integrated into a surveillance system. The challenges to this are just as we saw 10 or 15 years ago, in that the majority of vendors are using proprietary interfaces, making it difficult for systems integrators to build a system that can scale or for an end user to change from one system to another.”
And according to Levit, this is what makes ONVIF’s work significant. “ONVIF is excited to build on this platform to ensure descriptive and detailed data that is generated by
ONVIF conformant products can be used across surveillance systems and elsewhere,” Levit said. “ONVIF develops specifications that are packaged into a profile, and the profiles, together with add-ons, are what our conformance process is based on. To ensure interoperability with a profile, a product needs to be certified as ONVIF conformant.
He added: "We encourage ONVIF Full and Contributing members and their registered affiliates to join the new metadata working group and contribute to this initiative.”