Say Hello to the IoT Expert Group

IoT (the Internet of Things) is a hot topic in technology today, and those of you who follow OSGi will have noticed a number of IoT related events over the past year. 

The first IoT demo/hackathon took place at the OSGi Community Event in late 2014, and served as an excellent demonstration of what can already be achieved with OSGi specifications. More recently in 2015 the OSGi Alliance hosted a pair of public IoT requirements gathering meetings in Berlin and San Jose. Some of the requirements gathered at these events are already addressed by new specifications in the OSGi R6 release (Final drafts are available at http://www.osgi.org/Specifications/Drafts), however others are not completely addressed by any existing OSGi specification.

The interest generated by these meetings (representatives from 35 companies attended) has made clear that the Alliance's work with IoT has significant support, and so the OSGi Board has approved the creation of an IoT Expert Group within the Alliance specification process. The Expert Group charter is available at http://www.osgi.org/IOTEG/HomePage and, in summary, it states that the Expert Group will work to provide solutions for IoT use cases within the scope of an OSGi framework.

As interim chair of the IoT Expert Group it is my job to bootstrap the expert group membership, and to begin the process of turning IoT requirements into OSGi specifications. As part of this process the OSGi Alliance IoT Expert group would like to invite you all to a public IoT day at the next Expert Group meeting in Turin, Italy on Thursday 17^th September 2015 between 0930 and 1730. This will be a free public event, open to both OSGi members and non-members, but does require attendees to pre-register by contacting s.schwarze@prosyst.com.

Please join us if you can. We'll be discussing how you can get involved with the IoT Expert Group, whether that is providing requirements, writing the specifications or developing a reference implementation. We'll also spend much of the day gathering requirements, discussing their relative priorities, and seeing which OSGi specifications may already address them.

If you can't make it to Turin (or even if you can) then anyone can raise requirements using the OSGi bugzilla at https://osgi.org/bugzilla/ - Make sure you use the IoT RFP (RFP 174) as a reference for your “Document Feedback”. You can also follow the RFP (and any new IoT RFPs) at https://github.com/osgi/design. OSGi members can also join the IoT Expert Group mailing list to begin following the Expert Group's work.

I look forward to seeing you in Turin,

Tim Ward (Paremus)

IoT Expert Group Interim Chair

P.S.

I just wanted to add that while IoT is “the latest hot topic” it is nothing very new for OSGi. OSGi was originally created to support home automation devices, residential gateways and embedded systems. As a result of this OSGi already has most of the features needed for an IoT platform – no wonder the IoT demo was so successful! If you want proof of how long OSGi has been working in this area then take a look at this video...