BIG IoT - Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the Internet of Things

Project Information

BIG IoT

Grant agreement ID: 688038

DOI

10.3030/688038

Project closed

EC signature date 11 November 2015

Start date 1 January 2016

End date 31 December 2018

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 7 999 882,50

EU contribution

€ 7 999 882,50

Coordinated by

SIEMENS AKTIENGESELLSCHAFT
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BIG IoT (BIG IoT - Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the Internet of Things)

Reporting period: 2017-07-01 to 2018-12-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

"Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is an increasing commercial reality and connected ‘things’ are already largely outnumbering Web users. Hence, the IoT plays a tremendous role in digitalization efforts. Possible applications and market areas range from smart cities to autonomous manu-facturing. In order to provide access to data (and functionalities) of connected things, dozens of IoT platforms have emerged, such as ThingWorx, Siemens’ MindSphere, or Bosch’s IoT Suite.
However, there is still a crucial issue in the IoT: the missing interoperability between platform protocols and interfaces. Today, IoT platforms are vertically oriented and often still closed systems. A heterogeneous landscape of standards is used by some IoT platforms and others are solely relying on proprietary interfaces. This fragmentation of the IoT and the lack of interoperability prevent the emergence of IoT ecosystems that could bring substantial economic value. A recent McKinsey study estimates that 40% of the economic potential of the IoT directly depends on interoperability.

The vision of BIG IoT has been to address these interoperability issues of the IoT. We defined the aim of this work as follows:
The overall goal of the BIG IoT project is to remove technological market entry barriers of service and application providers of the Internet of Things by exploiting the capabilities of smart object platforms through establishing syntactic and semantic interoperability.

By developing a solution for the interoperability gap (i.e. the BIG IoT API and its influence on standardization at W3C WoT) and for advertising and monetizing IoT resources (i.e. the BIG IoT Marketplace), we showed how an IoT ecosystem can be kick-started. This has significant impact on socio-economic factors by creating new business opportunities for IoT resource consumers and providers who find each other via the Marketplace.

Thereby, the laid out and achieved project objectives have been:

# Objective 1: Development of the open BIG IoT API as a generic interface to multi-domain smart object platforms.
# Objective 2: Development of a marketplace for applications and services to foster an IoT ecosystem.
# Objective 3: Provision of a software infrastructure enabling the development, discovery, and orchestration of applications and services.
# Objective 4: Engage with on-going standardization activities to receive input for BIG IoT API and deliver contributions to standards development.
# Objective 5: Foster developer community to establish the usage of the BIG IoT API by conducting focused dissemination and exploitation activities as well as 2 Open Calls for participation.
# Objective 6: Definition and realization of innovative use cases that work dependably with different kinds of data sources to demonstrate the developed technology stack."

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

"The project results were achieved in 7 different work packages.
WP2 interacted with WP3, WP4, WP5 and WP7 by providing the requirements for the specification of the BIG IoT API, marketplace, realization of use cases, and Open Calls.
WP3 provided the BIG IoT API as well as implementations of compliant platforms to the pilots in WP5.
WP4 was responsible for providing the marketplace that connected the different stakeholders and enables the BIG IoT ecosystem for the pilot regions in WP5.
Inputs from WP2, WP3, WP4 and WP5 were used in WP6 and WP7 for the dissemination and exploitation of achieved results.

The key results of the project are:
# The BIG IoT API and its implementation as a software library addresses the interoperability gap. Naturally, it is impossible to dictate one API for the IoT, since purpose and domain of IoT platforms differ. Instead of defining a single gigantic IoT API that covers all possible IoT platform functionalities, the BIG IoT API defines a generic base structure, which can be instantiated by annotation with terms from a semantic vocabulary. The advantage is that the semantic vocabulary is easier to be developed in a community process, which is essential for building a multi-platform IoT ecosystem. In this way the API is kept slim and easy understandable while being generic and applicable in different domains.
# The BIG IoT Marketplace has shown how the market entry barriers to an IoT ecosystem can be further decreased. Such a marketplace is the corner stone of an IoT ecosystem and enables the advertising, discovery and monetization of IoT resources.
# The BIG IoT pilots (Barcelona, Berlin/Wolfsburg, and Piedmont) and 2 open calls evaluated the developed technologies by integrating several IoT platforms that contributed over 220 publicly accessible IoT resources. Together with multiple service and application implementations, these platforms were BIG IoT-enabled.

A key pillar of the project's exploitation path is the contribution of the marketplace implementation and inconjunction with the BIG IoT API implementation to the Eclipse Bridge.IoT open source project. Based on this major achievement, the partners developed exploitation strategies and business models specific to their organizations.

As key dissemination highlights of the BIG IoT project, we list here 2 overview journal articles. These are 2 exmples out of many further publications and talks that are outcome of the project's work.
# Bröring, A., A. Ziller, V. Charpenay, S. Schmid, A.S. Thuluva, D. Anicic, A. Zappa, M.P. Linares, L. Mikkelsen, C. Seidel (2018): The BIG IoT API - Semantically Enabling IoT Interoperability. IEEE Pervasive Computing, 17(4), pp. 41-51.
# Bröring, A., S. Schmid, C.-K.Schindhelm A. Khelil, S. Kaebisch, D. Kramer, D. Le Phuoc, J. Mitic, D. Anicic, E. Teniente (2017): Enabling IoT Ecosystems through Platform Interoperability. IEEE Software, 34(1), pp. 54-61."

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The central impact of BIG IoT is its solution for closing the interoperability gap between existing IoT platforms through the BIG IoT API. Further, by developing the marketplace for IoT resources, the means for initiating an IoT ecosystem were provided. Deployed for cities or regions, the marketplace, in conjunction with the API, has great socio-economic potential, as it can boost the exchange between IoT consumers and providers.

Through the successfully initiated Eclipse open source project Bridge.IoT we expect to attract a new IoT players to utilize and extend the devloped results. This is not just the IoT (device- and cloud-level) platform providers that have to implement the BIG IoT API, but also service providers that are willing to offer access to their data on the BIG IoT marketplace as well as the developers that are attracted by the advantages of the BIG IoT API. Thus, the BIG IoT solution is targeting many different stakeholders of the IoT ecosystem.

Beyond contributing to the Eclipse open source community, the BIG IoT project actively shaped the work on standardization at the W3C Web of Things. It is expected that the core of W3C WoT will be officially recommended standard within the next months.

Figure 2: BIG IoT Solution

Figure 1: Missing Interoperability

Figure 3: BIG IoT High Level Architecture