VICINITY project at 1st meeting of ISG CIM “Cross-cutting Context Information Management for smart city interoperability” by ETSI

Thursday, February 9, 2017 (All day) to Friday, February 10, 2017 (All day)
Sophia Antipolis, France
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The new ISG CIM (cross-cutting Context Information Management for smart city interoperability) was approved by the ETSI Director General on 19 December 2016 and had its kick-off meeting at ETSI on 9-10 February 2017. The founding members are Telefónica, NEC Europe, Orange, Easy Global Market and iMEC VZW. The ISG will develop a Context Information Management layer which will sit above the oneM2M Service Layer and be used to integrate data for Smart City applications. The kick-off meeting appointed Lindsay Frost (NEC) as chair of the ISG and Cathy Mulligan (UK Future Cities Catapult) as vice chair.

The scope of the initial work items were approved:

  • DMI/CIM-001-AB (MI ) Annotated Bibliography
  • DGR/CIM-002-UC (GR CIM 002) Use Cases
  • DGR/CIM-003-GAP (GR CIM 003) Architecture and Gap Analysis
  • DGS/CIM-004-APIprelim (GS CIM 004) API
  • DGS/CIM-005-DPP (GS CIM 005) Data Publication Platforms
  • DGS/CIM-006-MOD0 (GS CIM 006) Information Model

In the first phase, the ISG will develop informative Group Reports (GR) on topics such as Use Cases, Architecture and Identification of standardisation gaps, and in the second phase it will develop Group Specifications (GS) on topics such as APIs, Data Publication Platforms and the Information Model.

Presentation Feedback

Key issues for ISG CIM include:

  • Overlap with oneM2M and TC SmartM2M: There are considered by the Management teams of oneM2M and SmartM2M to be overlaps with their scope and objectives and there were concerns about ETSI’s obligations to the other oneM2M partners and the possible reaction of TTA (Telecommunications Technology Association of Korea) to the ISG going ahead. it has taken a year to resolve these concerns sufficiently for the ISG to be launched and joint discussions will be held between the management teams of ISG CIM and TC SmartM2M to agree how they will work together in the future and how ISG CIM will add value to the oneM2M IoT platform.
  • Cross-cutting use cases: Semantic-layer standards will be needed to enable open data from different domains to be correlated. Cross-cutting (cross domain) use cases can therefore best demonstrate the benefits of the proposed Context Information Management layer and the requirements of a number of convincing cross-domain use cases should be used as the basis of the CIM specifications. There are several cross-cutting use cases amongst the VICINITY pilots:
    • Smart Lighting and Smart Parking so that lighting is only provided when car parking is booked and used in order to save energy.
    • Smart Buildings and Smart Mobility to ensure that power is available to charge electric vehicles when required in order to reduce GHG emissions and improve air quality in a neighbourhood.
    • Smart Parking and e-Health to ensure that parking spaces are available for health professionals when required.
    • Smart Energy and Smart Buildings to improve the buildings environment and energy management based on information collected on the indoor and outdoor environment including energy consumption and production.
    • E-Health and Smart Appliances to monitor appliances to check if they have been ‘left on’ by the user (detection of abnormal events).
  • Use of RDF vs. NGSI: ISG CIM is suggesting that a FIWARE NGSI API should be the only approach used to specify and request the context information needed, whereas some members think that an RDF based approach should also be considered. It has previously been considered that a multiplicity of standards will be used for the IoT and so an exclusive focus on NGSI by ISG CIM may not be the best approach.
  • Control of Devices: One of the conditions of the ISG going ahead was that the Context Information Management layer should sit above the oneM2M platform and not control IoT devices directly. This goes against the FIWARE and W3C IoT approaches where devices can be addressed and controlled directly, and will cause problems with some of the use cases being discussed.

Useful Links

ISG CIM contributions and meeting reports

Press Release

Participants to the meeting