Last week at the inaugural IoT Slam® Live, Internet of Things conference, OCF member and Principal Architect of Emerging Technologies at Shaw Communications, Clarke Stevens presented attendees with a vital component of IoT development – interoperability- in a presentation called Developing for the Interoperable Internet of Things. We have excerpted some of his presentation here.

As we know, two of the biggest problems troubling IoT is incompatibility and security. The technology and implementation in the Internet of Things doesn’t really achieve its objective unless the devices across different ecosystems work together – and they must do so securely. A developer can create a solution for a particular ecosystems that may have its own defined way of communicating or collecting information, but doing so limits their market potential and more innovative aspects may never come to fruition. Of course, developers can build support across multiple ecosystems, but complicates development, expands the code footprint, increased costs, and further complicates security.

The continually lowering cost of compute and connectivity means that it’s now economically feasible to make just about anything part of IoT. Even though each Thing only talks to that Thing’s app on your phone, or to its dedicated service in the Cloud, or to the rest of the proprietary system that’s being installed in your factory.  But that’s not going to deliver the true vision of the Internet of Things. It is vital that these devices and sensors don’t just get connected, but that they can communicate!  And that’s where the common language is important.

OCF is a collaboration between many industry-leading organizations to define a secure common language for the IoT and are working to enable the true vision of IoT. OCF is providing a clear starting point through a common security framework that allows reliable interoperability among devices from different manufacturers. OCF is solving this problem by delivering a RESTful, crowd-sourced, data-model-based system designed for interoperability from the start.

Not only is the OCF Specification built for interoperability from the ground up, but OCF Security Framework helps to build in security right from the beginning. OCF resources such as IoTivity code and the IoTivity stack implement security that will pass the OCF Certification Test Tool making it easier to build a secure device.

All of this architecture is designed for consistency across multiple device types – from small sensors to Cloud services – multiple OSs and platforms, and across many different vertical markets. This is the core concept of OCF – a certified open-source implementation that enables development for the interoperable Internet of Things.