Image ©Ainsley Seago. Used under CC by 4.0 license.
ETSI issued a rather enigmatic and acronym-laden press release last week that had some important things to say about data sharing in smart cities.
It opened by saying: “The ETSI Industry Specification Group for cross-cutting Context Information Management (ISG CIM) has just released its main specification GS CIM 009 for NGSI-LD API, particularly targeting smart city applications and government services.
It then went on to explain: “The name ‘NGSI-LD’ refers to early work of the Open Mobile Alliance in defining high-level NGSI interfaces as well as advances from the Linked Data community.”
Nowhere did it trouble to offer an explanation of what NGSI might mean. Nor was it explained in GS CIM 009, even though that document possesses a page devoted to definitions and abbreviations.
Data sharing will be essential
NGSI stands for Next Generation Service Interfaces and these will be key to enabling data sharing and realising the full potential of IoT enabled smart cities, and indeed many other IoT applications.
Just how important can be discovered from a Smart Cities Data Sharing Framework, a March 2018 publication from the US based Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS), a 150 strong organisation that claims to bring together the top global ICT companies.
In that publication ATIS said: “As a growing number of cities begin to create new smart cities applications — and in some cases, leverage existing investments — data will play a key role in realising success. While smart cities infrastructure will serve as the engine, data sharing platforms will act as the fuel for building new applications across city resources and citizen needs.”
ATIS assessed data sharing alternatives for smart cities and proposed a blueprint for a common framework, a set of critical components and an evolutionary path from data collection to data monetisation. It did not mention NGSI.
Making data sharing simple
So back to that ETSI press release. It went on to explain that a significant amount of the data collected in a smart city never gets leveraged because of the challenges in interpreting data models and API standards for using the data across platforms.
ETSI ISG CIM chair, Dr Lindsay Frost was quoted saying: “Smart cities will be the first ones to benefit from all this work, as the NGSI-LD API is used to ‘glue together’ existing databases across the many city services for citizens.”
It explained: “The new specification defines a simple way to send or request data, using a serialisation format (JSON-LD) which is very familiar to many developers so that rapid adoption is facilitated.
“The important feature is that data and its context such as the meaning, relationships, source or licensing of that data, etc. are transmitted together. The approach can directly re-use work on matching terminology for things and services which is ongoing in multinational collaboration with many standards organisations.”
The key paragraph is this one. The emphasis is mine. “The new specification defines a simple way to send or request data, using a serialisation format (JSON-LD) which is very familiar to many developers so that rapid adoption is facilitated.
The important feature is that data and its context such as the meaning, relationships, source or licensing of that data etc are transmitted together.The approach can directly re-use work on matching terminology for things and services which is ongoing in multinational collaboration with many standards organisations.”
