ETSI IoT Week: semantics, experiences and security

Sophia Antipolis, 28 October 2019

ETSI IoT Week 2019 (21-25 October) drew more than 200 attendees to ETSI’s headquarters for what has become a must attend event for anyone who wants to understand the importance of standard-enabled technologies for IoT service deployments, in many different sectors.

During a rich and fruitful week, a diversity of attendees and speakers from policy makers, city representatives, academia, Commissioners, industry manufacturers, vendors from small and large companies or anthropologists mingled to share their experience and challenges. 

The ETSI event kicked off with a daylong oneM2M Developers Tutorial that allowed developers to experience the use of oneM2M open source solutions, along with practical hands-on development activities.

The ETSI IoT Workshop, which included an update on the state of IoT standardization, offered a vast array of use cases and presented how the ETSI, 3GPP and oneM2M standards integrate and complement each other to support an overall IoT chain.

ETSI SAREF (Smart Applications REFerence) ontology introduced asemantic interoperability standard for energy, environment and buildings, smart cities, industry and manufacturing, smart agriculture and food chain domains. This is an essential feature when machines from different domains need to understand the information that is carried by the data that they exchange.

This is a crucial contribution to the development of the global digital market and paves the way for evolving requirements as deployment unfolds.

Another day focused on real experiences and lessons learned from the application of IoT in various domains and parts of the world, including smart cities, services and manufacturing and how 5G will empower these new sectors. A half day was also dedicated to the H2020 EU large scale pilots launched in 2016.

In addition, during coffee and lunch breaks, attendees were able to visit a set of IoT Standard Showcases that enabled them to see and interact with real-life implementations of standard-based technologies applied to IoT services.

However, and it wasn’t by chance, the last sessions addressed security and privacy, the most challenging issue in all IoT domains, given that security by design seems to be the ultimate solution to address the topic.

Asking Enrico Scarrone, Chair of ETSI SmartM2M and oneM2M Steering Committee which key message we should remember, he answered “implementing IoT standards is easy and convenient, in the long term you need an interoperable and sustainable solution and it’s the only way of doing things which would be more complex otherwise”.

As you read these few lines, you may have missed the event and our presentations. Have a look at the presentations and check on our technology pages if one of our areas of work is not relevant to you.