Eclipse Bridge.IoT

Scope

The Eclipse project Bridge.IoT aims at igniting an ecosystem around IoT data and services. Bridge.IoT “bridges” the walled gardens between companies data silos by fostering collaboration among the ecosystem stakeholders, and overcomes the interoperability gap of today's IoT through a common API.

The Eclipse project develops an open source Data Marketplace and a semantic API. The Marketplace provides the meeting place for data providers and consumers. Data providers can offer and monetize their data assets on the marketplace, and data consumers can find the needed data. Once a data consumer subscribes an offer, its applications is able to gain immediate access to the data assets – in a peer-to-peer fashion – on the provider end. Thus, the data assets remain under the control of their owners, who can manage and monitor the access.

A Web Portal of the Data Marketplace assists developers of a data platform or service to describe their data assets semantically and publish them online. Likewise, application developers can use the Web Portal to easily search for desired data offers, using the semantic search capability of the marketplace.

Therefore, the Bridge.IoT project provides three elementary components:

• Bridge.IoT Marketplace – a reference implementation including the marketplace API, a basic Web portal as well as the core backend functionality.
• Bridge.IoT Provider Lib – an SDK for marketplace interactions (registration) and an API to be deployed/integrated by providers to allow consumers direct and secure access to registered resources.
• Bridge.IoT Consumer Lib – an SDK for marketplace interactions (discovery and subscriptions) and to access resources of providers.

Marketplace for IoT data

With the technology, concepts and semantic standards, provided by Bridge.IoT, the basis is created to enable the second use of already existing data and a establish the interoperability between the domain silos.

The key elements are to provide a platform that enables the data consumer to easily discover and access data in a uniform manner using semantic descriptions.

• Standardized ways to access data from different sources in a secure way.
• Bridging the Interoperability gap between silos by a common semantic vocabulary (Aggregating data from different sources by canonical data models).
• Enabling automated intelligent devices, that automatically integrate new data sources.
• Without loosing control of the data. The data will always stay at the provider. Enabling in addition the marketplace to easily scale.

Features at a glance

The Bridge.IoT API offers the following core functionalities:

1. Identity management to enable users (developers, administrators) to self-register their organizations and create provider and consumer instances along with the necessary IDs and credentials
2. Registration of resource offerings, to allow providers to offer and advertise their assets on the marketplace
3. Discovery of resources according to consumer-defined search criteria (i.e. queries) at run-time
4. Access to offered resources on a provider instance by means of request/response or streaming protocols
5. Vocabulary management for semantic descriptions of offerings, queries, input/output data, etc.
6. Security management including authentication, authorization, and key management
7. Accounting of access to resources, which allows the monetization of assets through charging and billing

Become Bridge.IoT compatible

Bridge.IoT provides easy-to-use SDKs for its APIs to support developers to extend their software and interact with the Data Marketplace at runtime – either to publish data offers or to discover them. The SDKs also implement the peer-to-peer data exchange protocol between data consumers and providers, and support data consumers to automatically integrate data obtained from different providers based on the semantic descriptions.With only a few lines of code, you are now able to extend your data platform, service or application, and participate in the Bridge.IoT data ecosystem. As a data owner, you can finally monetize your assets. And, as an application developer, you are now able to utilize Bridge.IoT marketplaces to find and subscribe relevant data assets and use them in your application.

Integrate Bridge.IoT in a IoT landscape

Beside harmonization of existing IoT platforms (by encouraging their providers to implement the Bridge.IoT API), the main focus of the Eclipse Bridge.IoT project is on establishing marketplaces for IoT data and services. At the time present, such a marketplace component is a missing building block in the Eclipse IoT landscape. This project aims to fill this gap. The success of this initiative depends on attracting a significant amount of IoT players that share the belief in open standards enabling cross-platform and cross-domain services and applications. This is not just the platform providers that have to implement the Bridge.IoT API but also service providers that are willing to offer access to their data on Bridge.IoT marketplaces as well as the developers that are attracted by the advantages of the Bridge.IoT API.

The Eclipse IoT Working Group has a high visibility among all kinds of IoT players and the community around Eclipse IoT has a lot of experience in the IoT sector, from which the Bridge.IoT project can profit. On the other hand, the Eclipse IoT community can benefit from standardization efforts of the Bridge.IoT initiative.

With respect to other Eclipse IoT projects, we see the following interesting connections:

• Eclipse Vert.x could be an enabler for additional implementations of the Bridge.IoT Lib for different programming languages.
• Eclipse Paho and Eclipse Mosquitto are candidates to enable MQTT for the data access established between consumer and provider.

Get ready and join the Bridge.IoT ecosystem!