Sophia Antipolis, 22 October 2014

The second workshop jointly organized by the European Commission’s DG CONNECT and ETSI on smart appliances took place at ETSI in Sophia Antipolis on 14 October.

The workshop saw the presentation of the second interim report of TNO’s study on a common ontology language.  TNO’s study, being developed on behalf of the European Commission, will help the elaboration of specifications within ETSI’s SmartM2M technical committee. Presentations also outlined ETSI’s proposals in the areas of security, interoperability and certification process.

As discussed during the workshop, domestic or industrial energy using and producing products, also called appliances, will not be stand-alone systems in the future. They will be systems which consist of devices from different vendors added at different points in time, which will necessitate open interfaces. These systems will also need to be able to communicate with information systems from different business actors and with different service platforms. Interoperability will become a key factor and a challenge in order to create an ecosystem for the Internet of Things. The availability of standardized test suites will be an important enabler in this field.

In ETSI, smart appliances standards are being handled by the SmartM2M technical committee and by the oneM2M partnership project. To turn commitments into action, a clear roadmap and milestones were introduced by TC SmartM2M and the first ETSI specifications are planned to be published during Q2 2015.