OMA SpecWorks has a long history to enable interoperable IoT systems that are scalable, secure, and manageable. The LwM2M protocol and IPSO data models enable developers to build full IoT systems that support both management and consistent data interfaces while being lightweight enough to work with devices that are constrained either in processing or networking capabilities. IPSO Smart Objects build on the LwM2M object model to bring a comprehensive set of fundamental models for sensors and actuators to easy use by the developers.
The IoT industry has come a long way from countless proprietary stovepipe solutions to embracing standard solutions today. Still, it is a fact that there exist several heterogeneous IoT ecosystems that sometimes compete, but often exist primarily to support a specific IoT applied segment. While in practice all modern ecosystems have embraced the Internet Protocol and other IETF technologies as the foundation of their communication stack when it comes to representation of data and their semantics there exists lots of variation on syntax and structure. As a result, when building an IoT system that needs to communicate with devices and services from different ecosystems, there is still a considerable amount of costly integration work needed.
At OMA SpecWorks we acknowledge that achieving interoperability across ecosystems is key for accelerating the adoption and deployment of successful IoT solutions. Therefore, we have been part of the One Data Model (OneDM) liaison group from early on to address the challenges for interoperable data models. So far, the work has resulted in a shared format called Semantic Definition Format (SDF) for defining data models optimized for interoperability, as well as an exploration into how the interoperability will work in practice, including the potential definition of a set of data models shared across all the ecosystems. A first step here is the playground, which is an area where organizations can publish their data models translated to into SDF for others to test against. The intent with OneDM is to be able to automate the translation between different models, replacing costly and error-prone manual integration work.
It is important to note that OneDM facilitates interoperability on the meaning of data between ecosystems, it does not replace the need for the ecosystems themselves. By supporting OneDM, the OMA SpecWorks ecosystem is strengthened as it will be able to map to even more devices and systems.
We have already contributed all the objects created in the IPSO Working Group to the OneDM experimental playground under BSD-3 license. We plan to submit future versions of the IPSO objects as stable OneDM definitions. We have also been actively ensuring that SDF works well with IPSO, translating IPSO objects to other ecosystems and back. We are looking forward to continue working with the OneDM liaison group to further facilitate interoperability of OMA SpecWorks technologies with other IoT ecosystems.