Alignment to M2M and middle-layer players and protocols of IoT ecosystem

[Thad Guidry]

Hello,

My name is Thad Guidry and I am a Data Architect working for Ericsson, the telecom co. and little known, 5th largest software development company, behind Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. If you own and use a cell phone, 80% chance your communications fly through our equipment and software daily :)

My particular interest is to ensure that the middle-layers are not forgotten during our discussions which touch on many telecom, software, and applications, i.e., Everyone else that isn't represented well here, so I will be their impromptu representative for now.

In particular, a few middle-layers that come into play for IoT already are:

1. IPv6 - Also known as a Thing ID to many of us already who have to manage or deal with data from large sensor networks.

2. CoAP http://coap.technology/

a. Specifically the CoAP link format defined in RFC 6690 where in section 1.2.3 describes the Resource Directory - Think of this as a limited search engine for constrained M2M resources.https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6690#section-1.2.3

3. Previous and working standards under IPv6 and IoT that are utilized in working middle-layers for the past 6-7 years, which are noted here: http://iot6.eu/ipv6_advantages_for_iot

4. Noted in #3 is 'Some of the IoT6 developments like GLowBALIP and the Identifier system would benefit hugely if their attributes were standardized in this context much more rigidly for IoT.'

a. To that end, you have efforts in the Open Mobile Alliance who sort of drive IoT innovation (because they have to deal with all our requests and process them to make IoT happen :) ) http://openmobilealliance.org/about-oma/work-program/m2m-enablers/

If you go through 1 - 4 then you'll get a pretty good picture about where Schema.org should concentrate its efforts to help others.  Particularly with Scan and Discovery.

Our TODO list to help IoT-Schema.org alignment should be:

A. First off, we'll really want to add IPv6address as a new property to http://schema.org/Thing

B. Confirm that we are OK with using MTE to type a Thing as also being able to provide a DataFeed Provider, or in other words, that a Thing can provide a DataFeed...just as we allow a Thing to provide a dataFeedElement  https://schema.org/DataFeed

1. This is because of various interop reasons in M2M, but primarly because of IETF's work on SCTP_SDP draft.  Example:  Enumeration: MediaType This enumeration defines the possible media types in the MediaIndicator data type. Enumeration Description Audio Represents an audio stream (m=audio in SDP [RFC4566]). Video Represents a video stream (m=video in SDP [RFC4566]). Data Represents a data channel [IETF_SCTP_SDP_draft].

Thanks and that's enough to get us started I'm sure !!!

-Thad

[Thomas Bergwinkl]

I don't think IPv6 address is what you want. Usualy you want to know how to speak to a thing (protocol, port, host/ip). The url property or the subject in RDF is what you want.