The UK Government’s Hypercat standard is collaborating with the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), to develop interoperability standards for the Internet of Things.
They’re sharing ideas about their resources currently in use to ensure the interoperability of 212 billion devices projected to be connected to the Internet by 2020.
Hypercat, which was set up by a group of 40 UK-based tech firms, including IBM, ARM and BT, is a specification that lets applications ask data hubs what types of data it holds and what permission it needs to ask them, making sense of it without human involvement. It can browse machines, searches by metadata and uses standards such as HTTPS, Restful APIs and JSON as a data format.
On the other hand, OIC, which is led by Intel, Samsung, Dell and others, aims to build up on existing technologies, such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Zigbee, with plans to reveal its own open-source software by the third quarter of this year.
Justin Anderson, CEO and founder of IoT firm Flexeye, which leads the Hypercat standard, told CBR: "We actually have OIC’s input into the Hypercat standard so we’re not competing against them."
"We recognise that Intel and Samsung are creating and have other problems that need to be solved. But at this moment, the focus is not completely clear what exactly they’re trying to address and where they’ve got to.
"But we are in discussion with them to ensure that the problems that we’re looking to solve are not the same problems that they’re applying their resources to solve. That would end up as an issue where you’ve got two competing standards at a particular point, so clearly that would be daft."
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He added: "Part of our job is to insure that we are working and collaborating with other consortia to be able to take the best of what they have and share where we’ve got to by a process of open innovation.
"We all want the same thing, which is the IoT. And whilst we have ARM in our consortium and they have Intel in their consortium, we recognise that ARM and Intel need to work together and they recommend we need to work together too."
