Following the first three SAREF (Smart Applications REFerence ontology) specifications for energy, environment and buildings, the ETSI SmartM2M Technical Committee has just released three new specifications for smart cities, industry and manufacturing, and smart agriculture and food chain domains. These standards enable interoperability and therefore contribute to the development of the global digital market.
When the European Commission launched the SMART 2013/0077 Standardization Initiative on smart appliances, a survey was conducted. The outcome was to create commonly agreed semantics for smart appliances and build a reference ontology as an interoperability language, and, with the help of TC smartM2M and oneM2M, these standards are now a reality.
“The first ETSI SAREF specification was released in 2017; it was the first standard ontology in the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem. As the IoT addresses a diversity of activity sectors and even the same specific function or feature, it may not be understood and interpreted the same way,” says Enrico Scaronne, Chair of ETSI TC smartM2M. “The smartM2M specifications provide interoperability between solutions from different providers and among various activity sectors. These standards are designed to run on top of the oneM2M system, the IoT partnership project of which ETSI is a founding partner. OneM2M provides the communication and interworking framework to share the data among applications; SAREF provides the semantic interoperability necessary to share the information carried by the data.”
The SAREF4CITY specification, ETSI TS 103 410-4, has been developed with the stakeholders who would need ontology such as other standardization bodies, associations, IoT platforms and European projects and initiatives. Use cases include eHealth and smart parking, air quality monitoring, mobility and street lighting. SAREF4CITY provides a common core of general concepts for smart city data for the IoT.
The SAREF4INMA specification, ETSI TS 103 410-5, was developed to solve the lack of interoperability between various types of production equipment that manufacture items in a factory. It also enables different organizations in the value chain to uniquely track back the manufacturer items for the corresponding production equipment, batches and material and retrieve the exact time of production. The zero defects manufacturing use case has been used to improve the manufacturing process flexibility in order to switch from one manufactured product to another in a timely manner, generating as little yield loss as possible.
The SAREF4AGRI specification, ETSI TS 103 410-6, addresses the Smart Agriculture and Food Chain domain. Use cases focus on livestock farming and smart irrigation and the integration of multiple data sources for the purpose of providing decision support services located on the local Farm Management System of the farmers or provided by a service over the network. Sources of interest include GPS, meteorological data, remote observation via satellite and local observation using near or proximal sensors. SAREF4AGRI provides for example the description of proximal sensors that measure relevant parameters for agriculture, including movement and temperature for cattle, moisture/humidity in the soil, Ph value, salinity and plant colour (NDVI).
ETSI TC SmartM2M is also working to include more activity sectors and to complete the development of an open portal to gather direct contributions to SAREF by 2020. The stakeholders’ evolving data model inputs can then be directly reflected in the ETSI SAREF and oneM2M specifications.
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