Internet of Things Sharing IoT data sustainably
Look beneath the surface of any city or large business organisation and you will see a patchwork of administrative and operational systems. These may involve geographic zones or different departments, each associated with a variety of customer services. In technical terms, there is likely to be a range of IT systems and telecommunications networks to handle the organisation’s information technology and communications needs.
W
hile these characteristics are common to all cities, each is unique in terms of its priorities. Increasingly, however,
businesses and cities are committing to environmentally friendly policies. This may involve the creation of open spaces, improvements in the transportation infrastructure or measures to reduce carbon emissions. These kinds of sustainability goals were central to the EU funded Horizon 2020 project, MySMARTLife, which involved the cities of Nantes, Hamburg, and Helsinki. T-Labs, which is DT’s arm for Research & Innovation activities, became involved in this project and worked closely with Hamburg to address its situation and objectives.
Infrastructure for managing city data The city of Hamburg operates under a transparency law that requires all data from public sources to be published. The data spectrum is both broad and multi-faceted. It includes static data, such as the opening times of schools. There are also live data streams such as the operational status of electric vehicle charging stations. Data formats also differ, ranging from public notices in electronic form to streams of data from connected sensors. One objective of the MySMARTLife project was to gather a broad spectrum of data from many different sources. T-Labs’ role was to develop the infrastructure to gather and
publish data so that third party fi rms could use them in analytics or service applications, for example.
We did not have the luxury of starting from a blank sheet of paper. Like many other cities, the municipal authorities in Hamburg operate many systems for different aspects of a city. Hamburg had built its own platform based on a standard developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). This is a common and logical starting point for many cities because it fi ts in with geo- location, surface planning and measurement activities that municipal agencies deal with on a day-to-day basis. This is a typical ‘brownfi eld’ scenario, involving data from legacy assets and built as silo systems. The T-Labs solution addressed two issues. One was the issue of sourcing and publishing city data, going beyond geo- spatial sources. Consider this as a step to source and share data across operational boundaries in ways that improve effi ciency and innovation. The second issue was to make it easy for data users to access data through an API. While the existing Hamburg system included an API, our analysis identified the need for an enhanced API. New features would enable a system administrator to assign access policies to end-point devices and data sources. An enhanced API would empower data providers to manage access and security at a granular level with different types of data consumer.
Open standards approach Since our team focuses on applied innovation, we searched for a standardised architecture rather than developing something one-off or new. We considered FiWARE and oneM2M specifi cations, preferring oneM2M which also aligns with our Java expertise and Scrum organising methodology.
oneM2M is a middleware technology for end-to-end systems. It sits between IoT applications on the upper level and a lower level of connected devices and other data sources. oneM2M defi nes a standard set of tools for building IoT systems. Examples include device management, subscription management and security, among others. The oneM2M framework meant that we only needed to implement a subset of oneM2M’s common service functions. We began with connectivity and data management, confi dent that we could implement additional capabilities in the future.
Platform for digital transformation The Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation (IOSB),
built a server to collect city data from parking lots and traffi c lights. My team developed a oneM2M data management platform to gather data from other sources and to publish it to third party users. We combined the two, effectively building a bridge, using oneM2M standardized interworking proxy entity (IPE). This architecture allows us to gather city data from many different sources and to combine with the primarily geospatial data from Hamburg’s in-house data platform. That is valuable for data users who now have a single way to access a wide and growing range of city data.
As cities and their service partners embark on smart city and digital transformation initiatives, it will become critical for service providers, system integrators and IT departments to plan for interoperable and extensible architectures using open standards, such as oneM2M, to interwork seamlessly with new and legacy systems that support different elements of their operations.
onem2m.org
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