Data Platforms: Interoperability and Insight

To provide a specific focus for discussing the interoperability requirements for Internet of Things (IoT) platforms, this chapter provides a discussion on information management. “Things” (specifically, sensors) are clearly central to the IoT. Sensors provide one view of the state of the environment of an application. Other information sources are also important, including situation reports and geospatial relationships. These may be partially derived from sensors but may be supplemented with interpretations derived from human or automated analysis. The chapter considers two specific types of stakeholder in the ecosystem and their expectations of an information sharing relationship. First, there is an information provider, who collects data from its own sensor deployments and wants to make this available to others under appropriate terms and conditions. Second, there is an information consumer, who wants to join the “data revolution” and build a new application that draws on multiple disparate sources of data.