Periodic Reporting for period 3 - VICINITY (Open virtual neighbourhood network to connect intelligent buildings and smart objects)
Période du rapport: 2019-01-01 au 2019-12-31
"The Internet of things (IoT) enables new services for consumers, municipalities, public bodies, and the European industry.
Such IoT services are based on data from various sources such as smartphones, dedicated sensors, or from the web, just for example.
The implementation of IoT services and solutions is still a challenge, because many different IoT platforms and standards are emerging that are not compatible; they create small, isolated, proprietary islands or silos in the global IoT landscape.
These are owned by ""big players"" such as Amazon, Microsoft, or IBM.
Citizens, consumers, SME, and other ""smaller players"" are in the risk of becoming fatally enclosed in proprietary platforms.
This would turn values and needs such as the privacy of consumers, but as well the future European industrial development into a pawn in the hands of a few ""big players"".
The overall objective VICINITY project is to open the IoT also for small and medium-sized companies (SME), public bodies, and even citizens, providing them with an open platform that fulfils highest standards regarding privacy.
The VINICTY IoT platform addresses the problem of interoperability in the IoT. Compared with competitors, the following key selling points are addressed:
First , the VICINITY project provides a platform that offers ""Interoperability as a Service"" among the existing silos.
VICINITY in particular targets consumers and entities such as municipalities or SME to allow them to offer IoT services without being restricted by limited interoperability.
Second, the VICINITY project will enable consumers to use these services with the highest standards of privacy and in line with latest EU legislation:
Like in social networks, a user decides which IoT data to share with which ""friend"", and for which purpose.
Unlike in most social network, the user's data will not be sent to a server.
Data will, depending on the choices of the user, be encrypted, aggregated, and anonymised, and only shared in that way directly with ""friends"".
Third, VICINITY provides a tailored and proven approach for SME and public bodies that strive to implement IoT projects: the platform is open source with a vast set of supported devices, and professional and lasting support at different levels, from operation as “platform as a service” to professional consulting is available.
The VICINITY IoT platform has been evaluated by four larger pilot-sites in the European Union and within a high number of smaller and medium-sized projects.
The applications of VICINITY cover first of all the energy, health, and traffic domains, but in other projects VICINITY is also used in industrial applications."
Such IoT services are based on data from various sources such as smartphones, dedicated sensors, or from the web, just for example.
The implementation of IoT services and solutions is still a challenge, because many different IoT platforms and standards are emerging that are not compatible; they create small, isolated, proprietary islands or silos in the global IoT landscape.
These are owned by ""big players"" such as Amazon, Microsoft, or IBM.
Citizens, consumers, SME, and other ""smaller players"" are in the risk of becoming fatally enclosed in proprietary platforms.
This would turn values and needs such as the privacy of consumers, but as well the future European industrial development into a pawn in the hands of a few ""big players"".
The overall objective VICINITY project is to open the IoT also for small and medium-sized companies (SME), public bodies, and even citizens, providing them with an open platform that fulfils highest standards regarding privacy.
The VINICTY IoT platform addresses the problem of interoperability in the IoT. Compared with competitors, the following key selling points are addressed:
First , the VICINITY project provides a platform that offers ""Interoperability as a Service"" among the existing silos.
VICINITY in particular targets consumers and entities such as municipalities or SME to allow them to offer IoT services without being restricted by limited interoperability.
Second, the VICINITY project will enable consumers to use these services with the highest standards of privacy and in line with latest EU legislation:
Like in social networks, a user decides which IoT data to share with which ""friend"", and for which purpose.
Unlike in most social network, the user's data will not be sent to a server.
Data will, depending on the choices of the user, be encrypted, aggregated, and anonymised, and only shared in that way directly with ""friends"".
Third, VICINITY provides a tailored and proven approach for SME and public bodies that strive to implement IoT projects: the platform is open source with a vast set of supported devices, and professional and lasting support at different levels, from operation as “platform as a service” to professional consulting is available.
The VICINITY IoT platform has been evaluated by four larger pilot-sites in the European Union and within a high number of smaller and medium-sized projects.
The applications of VICINITY cover first of all the energy, health, and traffic domains, but in other projects VICINITY is also used in industrial applications."
In VICINITY project, the VICINITY IoT platform has been developed.
The platform supports semantic interoperability across a vast set of different IoT objects.
Interoperability includes IoTivity, KURA e.g. via OSGI and Java, and openHAB.
The platform has been subject to extensive testing.
The IoT platform offers vast documentation on GitHub that is continuously improving and growing, and state-of-the-art bug tracking and issue management.
Also, the IoT platform VICINITY has been evaluated in four use cases in the cities of Oslo (NO), Tromso (NO), Martim Longo (PT) and Pilea Hortiatis (GR), and additionally in eight open call projects.
VICINITY has been (and still is) used successfully for indoor climate control, ambient assisted living, smart parting and intelligent traffic systems in the Norwegian use case sites.
Focus of the installations in Martim Longo is Energy Management; Pilea Hortiatis targets the eHealt domain.
For all use cases, after extensive integration testing, some improvements in VICINITY had been undertaken, and in total they show the high scalability and reliability of VICINITY.
Beyond that, a number of means to bring privacy to a very high level, compared with commercial alternatives have been evaluated and demonstrated, including micro-services for data aggregation and for homomorphic encryption.
Furthermore, dissemination and exploitation efforts have been strengthened towards the end of the project.
The IoT platform was presented at several meetings, conferences, and within three hackathons.
VICINITY's lasting commercialization and exploitation have been prepared by meetings and workshops that resulted in a commercialization agreement.
The platform supports semantic interoperability across a vast set of different IoT objects.
Interoperability includes IoTivity, KURA e.g. via OSGI and Java, and openHAB.
The platform has been subject to extensive testing.
The IoT platform offers vast documentation on GitHub that is continuously improving and growing, and state-of-the-art bug tracking and issue management.
Also, the IoT platform VICINITY has been evaluated in four use cases in the cities of Oslo (NO), Tromso (NO), Martim Longo (PT) and Pilea Hortiatis (GR), and additionally in eight open call projects.
VICINITY has been (and still is) used successfully for indoor climate control, ambient assisted living, smart parting and intelligent traffic systems in the Norwegian use case sites.
Focus of the installations in Martim Longo is Energy Management; Pilea Hortiatis targets the eHealt domain.
For all use cases, after extensive integration testing, some improvements in VICINITY had been undertaken, and in total they show the high scalability and reliability of VICINITY.
Beyond that, a number of means to bring privacy to a very high level, compared with commercial alternatives have been evaluated and demonstrated, including micro-services for data aggregation and for homomorphic encryption.
Furthermore, dissemination and exploitation efforts have been strengthened towards the end of the project.
The IoT platform was presented at several meetings, conferences, and within three hackathons.
VICINITY's lasting commercialization and exploitation have been prepared by meetings and workshops that resulted in a commercialization agreement.
"The VICINITY project offers several, partially independent, innovations that go beyond the state of the art.
The main innovation is Interoperability at a semantic level.
VICINITY does not aim at providing a new standard or platform - VICINITY just provides interoperability among existing platforms and standards as a service.
For this purpose, it combines semantic data in the form of ontologies with sensor data, and allows intelligent query and use of this knowledge across different domains.
Compared with ""large"" competitors like AWS, VICINITY specifically targets SME and smaller players.
VICINITY will be offered with a scalable amount of service and cost:
It will be available in a range from ""open source"" for free without any support to a platform as a service (PAS).
Together with the overall package that is optimised for SME, VICINITY shapes a perfect platform for SME.
As targeted impact, it is expected that in particular ""smaller"" players, in particular from the European Union will be encouraged and enabled to implement IoT solutions.
A particular innovation is the strong awareness of privacy in the architecture.
The combination of a P2P architecture (edge-like) with partial homomorphic encryption is unique.
The architecture is, for the IoT, is fully in line with the GDPR, and even allows to create aggregation of data (for a business purpose, for example) via micro-services; partially without collecting private data at all.
No other platform offers such a combination that might be a complete game-changer for the use of data and its business models in the internet."
The main innovation is Interoperability at a semantic level.
VICINITY does not aim at providing a new standard or platform - VICINITY just provides interoperability among existing platforms and standards as a service.
For this purpose, it combines semantic data in the form of ontologies with sensor data, and allows intelligent query and use of this knowledge across different domains.
Compared with ""large"" competitors like AWS, VICINITY specifically targets SME and smaller players.
VICINITY will be offered with a scalable amount of service and cost:
It will be available in a range from ""open source"" for free without any support to a platform as a service (PAS).
Together with the overall package that is optimised for SME, VICINITY shapes a perfect platform for SME.
As targeted impact, it is expected that in particular ""smaller"" players, in particular from the European Union will be encouraged and enabled to implement IoT solutions.
A particular innovation is the strong awareness of privacy in the architecture.
The combination of a P2P architecture (edge-like) with partial homomorphic encryption is unique.
The architecture is, for the IoT, is fully in line with the GDPR, and even allows to create aggregation of data (for a business purpose, for example) via micro-services; partially without collecting private data at all.
No other platform offers such a combination that might be a complete game-changer for the use of data and its business models in the internet."