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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - VICINITY (Open virtual neighbourhood network to connect intelligent buildings and smart objects)

Teaser

Summary

\"The Internet of things (IoT) enables new services for consumers, municipalities, public bodies, and the European industry.
Such IoT services are based on data from various sources such as smartphones, dedicated sensors, or from the web, just for example.
The implementation of IoT services and solutions is still a challenge, because many different IoT platforms and standards are emerging that are not compatible; they create small, isolated, proprietary islands or silos in the global IoT landscape.
These are owned by \"\"big players\"\" such as Amazon, Microsoft, or IBM.
Citizens, consumers, SME, and other \"\"smaller players\"\" are in the risk of becoming fatally enclosed in proprietary platforms.
This would turn values and needs such as the privacy of consumers, but as well the future European industrial development into a pawn in the hands of a few \"\"big players\"\".

The overall objective VICINITY project is to open the IoT also for small and medium-sized companies (SME), public bodies, and even citizens, providing them with an open platform that fulfils highest standards regarding privacy.
More technically, the project pursues the following objectives:
First, the VICINITY project wants to capture and document the needs and concerns of the the various stakeholders and citizens, and as well those of four pilot-sites that represent a broad spectrum of IoT services. Within the project, partners oversee and watch IoT standardisation and contribute to standardisation in order to increase privacy and trust of consumers to the IoT.
Second, the VICINITY project provides a platform that offers \"\"Interoperability as a Service\"\" among the existing silos.
VICINITY in particular targets consumers and entities such as municipalities or SME to allow them to offer IoT services without being restricted by limited interoperability.
Third, the VICINITY project will enable consumers to use these services with the highest standards of privacy and in line with latest EU legislation:
Like in social networks, a user decides which IoT data to share with which \"\"friend\"\", and for which purpose.
Unlike in most social network, the user\'s data will not be sent to a server.
Data will, depending on the choices of the user, be encrypted, aggregated, and anonymised, and only shared in that way directly with \"\"friends\"\".

The approach is demonstrated by four pilot-sites in the European Union.
The demo-sites cover the energy, health, and traffic domains.\"

Work performed

In the second reporting period, the work on the VICINITY IoT platform has been finished.
The platform supports semantic interoperability across a vast set of different IoT objects.
Interoperability includes IoTivity, KURA e.g. via OSGI and Java, and openHAB.
The platform has been subject to extensive testing.
The IoT platform offers vast documentation on GitHub that is continuously improving and growing, and state-of-the-art bug tracking and issue management.

Also, in the second reporting period, the IoT platform is integrated in four use cases in the cities of Oslo (NO), Tromso (NO), Martim Longo (PT) and Pilea Hortiatis (GR).
VICINITY is used for indoor climate control, ambient assisted living, smart parting and intelligent traffic systems in the Norwegian use case sites.
Focus of the installations in Martim Longo is Energy Management; Pilea Hortiatis targets the eHealt domain.
the use cases for demonstration are nearly finished and only minor issues are being improved after extensive integration testing, targeting mostly reliability.
Furthermore, the evaluation in the last reporting period has been prepared.
It is supported by a dashboard via which key performance indicators, usage, and other parameters can be monitored continuously over the last reporting period.

Last but not least exploitation and the impact have been strengthened by complementary actions.
This includes two open calls that have been done, integrating four additional SME into the VICINITY project.
Furthermore, additional features have been integrated to strengthen the key selling points of privacy and trust:
smart contracts that can be used together with a blockchain have been demonstrated to work with VICINITY, and (partial) homomorphic encryptions to permit highest privacy standards.

Final results

\"The VICINITY project offers several, partially independent, innovations that go beyond the state of the art.

The main innovation is Interoperability at a semantic level.
VICINITY does not aim at providing a new standard or platform - VICINITY just provides interoperability among existing platforms and standards as a service.
For this purpose, it combines semantic data in the form of ontologies with sensor data, and allows intelligent query and use of this knowledge across different domains.

Compared with \"\"large\"\" competitors like AWS, VICINITY specifically targets SME and smaller players.
VICINITY will be offered with a scalable amount of service and cost:
It will be available in a range from \"\"open source\"\" for free without any support to a platform as a service (PAS).
Together with the overall package that is optimised for SME, VICINITY shapes a perfect platform for SME.
As targeted impact, it is expected that in particular \"\"smaller\"\" players, in particular from the European Union will be encouraged and enabled to implement IoT solutions.

A particular innovation is the strong awareness of privacy in the architecture.
The combination of a P2P architecture (edge-like) with partial homomorphic encryption is unique.
The architecture is, for the IoT, is fully in line with the GDPR, and even might allow to create aggregation of data (for a business purpose, for example) without collecting private data at all.
No other platform offers such a combination that might be a complete game-changer for the use of data and its business models in the internet.\"