Towards Interoperability of Entity-based and Event-Based IoT Platforms: The Case of NGSI and EPCIS Standards

With the advancement of IoT devices and thanks to the unprecedented visibility and transparency they provide, diverse IoT-based applications are being developed. With the proliferation of IoT, both the amount and type of data items captured have increased dramatically. The data generated by IoT devices reside in different organizations and systems, and a major barrier to utilizing the data is the lack of interoperability among the standards used to capture the data. To reduce this barrier, two major standards have emerged: the Global Standards One (GS1) Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS) and the FIWARE Next Generation Services Interface (NGSI). However, the two standards differ not only in the data encoding but also in the underlying philosophy of representing IoT data; namely, EPCIS is event-based, and NGSI is entity-based. Interoperability between FIWARE and EPCIS is essential for system integration. This paper presents OLIOT Mediation Gateway, now one of the incubated generic enablers offered by the FIWARE Foundation, that realizes the required interoperability between NGSI and EPCIS systems. It also demonstrates the applicability and feasibility of the Gateway by applying it to a real-life case study of integrating transparency systems used in a meat supply chain

Oliot-OpenCity: open standard interoperable smart city platform

Smart cities generate huge amounts of data, which are often shared openly by multi-domain service providers. However, due to the lack of common standard interfaces, data models, and global ID management, smart city services suffers from fragmentation. It prevents data from being readily shared and accessible in a seamless way and restricts various services from being developed and discovered. To tackle this problem, we propose an open smart city platform, Oliot-OpenCity, built on the top of global standards ratified by GS1. The platform uses standardized event/master data to capture and store smart city data into an independently distributed repositories called EPC Information System (EPCIS), which can provide standard open interfaces to share resources and creates smart city data hub. Through Object Name Service (ONS) and Discovery Service (DS), it offers service and resource discovery to resolve distributed repositories and services from the various smart city domains. Moreover, to integrate the legacy city platforms, mediation gateways are proposed, which harmonize the fragmented key management and different data model into GS1 standards-based globally unique identifier and event/master data respectively. To show the feasibility of Oliot-OpenCity, we developed bus and vehicle information use cases which demonstrated its interoperability with other legacies, and the standardized data collection and sharing