Data marketplaces – driving adoption of IoT

The fragmentation of the Internet of Things (IoT) – resulting in devices or things that cannot talk to each other – prevent the widespread adoption of IoT ecosystems. Our research on data marketplaces aims at bridging the interoperability gap of the IoT and providing a scalable platform for data providers and consumers to meet and establish data-centric IoT ecosystems.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an increasing commercial reality, and connected Things are already largely outnumbering Web users. IoT applications play a role in a range of future technologies – everything from the smart home and autonomous driving to Industry 4.0. Likewise, the IoT plays a key role in the digital transformation efforts of small, medium and large companies.

The IoT segment generates huge amounts of data, which can be used by AI algorithms and applications to transform everyday life for people and businesses. However, key factors stand in the way of a game-changing tipping point for this technology. Interoperability, which could be described as the ability of IoT devices to communicate with each other, is missing – especially when it comes to varying platforms.

Adding to that, data platforms that facilitate data sharing among a range of stakeholders simply aren’t available or mature enough. This fragmentation and the lack of cross-platform interoperability prevent the emergence of flourishing IoT ecosystems.

In the context of the EU Horizon 2020 Project BIG IoT, we have developed a decentralized and open data marketplace platform that addresses the following challenges:

1) How can we enable semantic interoperability in open and rapidly growing IoT ecosystems?

2) How can we find, access and integrate data or information among various stakeholders in a scalable manner?

First, we enable interoperability through shared semantic data models used on the marketplace portal as well as the data exchange level (by a novel semantic API). Second, the marketplace portal allows data providers to annotate their data semantically when they offer their assets on the marketplace.

That makes it easier for data consumers and their IoT applications to discover the desired data assets through semantic search and facilitates the automatic integration of data into their applications.

In collaboration with Bosch Software Innovations, we have also developed ready-to-use Software Development Kits (SDK) that enable developers to seamlessly connect their applications to our marketplace and use the semantic API for accessing data in a uniform manner across heterogeneous sources.

The developed software is now available and maintained as part of the Eclipse open source software project: Bridge.IoT.

We have successfully demonstrated our data marketplace in a number of smart city related pilot use cases, ranging from bike sharing to smart parking applications and environmentally friendly navigation applications. Heterogeneous data sources were shared and integrated via the marketplace by using the semantic models developed at Bosch.