News Archives – Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF)

OCF publishes Matter bridge to strengthen smart home interoperability

Posted on: June 5, 2024

5^th June 2024: The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) published an update to its Secure IP Device Framework to bridge with the Matter device ecosystem. The update enables OCF and Matter devices to coexist and interact within the same smart home, strengthening interoperability, enhancing the user experience and improving return on investment for the homeowner.

“Full smart home and building automation has always been our priority, and is only possible through interoperability,” comments Brian Bishop, OCF President. “The explosion in IoT innovation, frameworks, regulations and more has created fragmentation, making interoperability a challenge. Bridging different ecosystems is a key step in addressing this, enabling Matter devices to be onboarded and managed within an OCF smart home network, and vice versa. This gives consumers and installers the choice, flexibility, and enhanced smart home experience they crave.”

The OCF-Matter bridge is composed of derived models that map connections between the two standards, enabling the devices to speak the same language and appear on the same network. This development is also relevant to support the convergence between residential and commercial buildings as infrastructure projects adopt unified building management systems and work towards cognitive buildings.

“The Connectivity Standards Alliance is proud to see initiatives like this as a result of the efforts from our mutual members,” said Tobin Richardson, President & CEO, Connectivity Standards Alliance. “The announcement of the OCF-Matter Bridge exemplifies our shared commitment to reducing barriers to interoperability and enabling opportunities for connectivity and innovation across diverse devices and platforms.”

Learn more about how OCF is enabling secure IoT interoperability in smart homes, buildings and cities.

Full details on the OCF-Matter specification can also be found here.

About Open Connectivity Foundation

The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) is a global, member-driven technical standards development organization. Its 500+ members are working to enable trust, interoperability, and secure communication between IP-connected IoT devices and services. It does this by fostering collaboration between stakeholders across the IoT ecosystem to deliver the freely-available ISO/IEC specifications, including the Secure IP Device Framework, its open-source reference implementation, and an industry-recognized certification program. This enables innovative new secure use cases and user experiences, reduces development costs, integration complexity and time to market, and simplifies regulatory compliance to IoT security and privacy baselines.

OCF members work across the enterprise layers of infrastructure, applications, and data. They collaborate to co-create and deploy systems in an open and standardized way, enabling devices to communicate over IP, regardless of form factor, operating system, service provider, transport technology, or ecosystem.

The vertical-agnostic technology has already seen significant adoption in the smart home sector and is now enabling the transition to secure, intelligent, Building Automation Systems (BAS) based on IP connectivity networks.

Adoption of OCF’s standard grows with Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) recognition

Posted on: February 14, 2024

14 February 2024 – The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) has announced that its Secure IP Device Framework (ISO/IEC 30118) has been adopted as a national standard in India. The standard, developed by a joint global collaborative effort, has been accredited by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), demonstrating the commitment of the Indian government to enabling trust, interoperability, and secure communication in its rapidly growing smart home and smart city ecosystems.

“We are excited to announce the adoption of the OCF Framework as a national standard in India. We have completed this adoption process following rigorous consultation and analysis,” said Ankur Basal, OCF India Forum member and Convenor for the BIS-LITD27 Work Group. “This recognition from the Indian government reinforces the credibility and reliability of the standard to play a significant role in supporting India’s aspirations for a more digitally connected society to support the wider realization of the Smart City Mission program in India.”

Strengthening IoT interoperability through standardization

India is working to deliver over 100 smart cities across the country to solve challenges associated with rapid urbanization. Smart cities can solve wider societal challenges such as transport management, healthcare, and energy consumption by providing and utilizing more accurate and up to date information, allowing everyone from governments to consumers to make more informed use of resources.

The OCF standard is poised to help solve these problems in India, as it provides businesses the opportunity to develop IoT technology based on OCF standards, ensuring interoperability between devices designed for use in smart homes and smart buildings. The standard will also support nationally connected smart city infrastructure as it is interoperable with industry standards such as oneM2M and MQTT which are currently in use. The OCF has several pilot projects for smart traffic management, health care, green energy and smart lighting in progress.

“We are pleased that the OCF Framework has been selected as a national standard in India as governments across the globe continue to realize the need to develop open infrastructure supporting smart city and smart home development,” comments Brian Bishop, OCF President. “This announcement showcases the potential for smart device innovation to be driven at a regional level as the OCF standard allows SMEs to create products, providing local governments in India the opportunity to develop new supply chains.”

An opportunity for national growth

The ability to use the Secure IP Device Framework ensures that future Indian IoT products and solutions will be secure by design and fit for a global market. OCF has done the legwork to map the standard to key industry and government IoT security baselines around the world. This means Indian developers can compile their compliance to IoT security baselines, as they will have already aligned with security requirements from standards such as NIST 8529, CAC2 Conveners, ENISA IoTSec, UK IoT Requirements and ETSI IoT Baseline Requirements through OCF certification.

Open Connectively Foundation and its members are ensuring that the interoperability needed for the Internet of Things exists, in order to create seamless, amazing experiences for end users. The OCF Certification Program includes conformance testing to ensure robust and secure connectivity, and to help manufacturers create products that “just work” with other OCF Certified IoT devices regardless of their form factors, operating systems, service providers or transports. India’s adoption of the OCF standard ensures clear routes for manufacturers are in place to allow them to create flexible products at scale.

OCF is the global, member-driven technical standards development organization working to enable trust, interoperability, and secure communication between IP-connected IoT devices and services.

Learn more about how OCF is enabling secure communications in smart cities and government infrastructure.

About Open Connectivity Foundation

DPC & Enturi wind energy data transparency project adopts OCF standard

Posted on: September 18, 2023

18 September, 2023 – Smart city and digital transformation specialists, Data Performance Consultancy (DPC), and wind turbine pioneer Enturi, have announced their partnership for a standards-based wind turbine and data management project. The collaboration will adopt the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) Secure IP Device Framework and pair Enturi’s wind turbine with DPC’s trusted data expertise to support both businesses and individuals in achieving their sustainability goals through the use of trusted and transparent data.

DPC is supporting the integration of sensors into Enturi’s portable and decentralised wind turbines. The turbines can then connect to DPC’s cloud platform to manage the secure communication and management of data. This approach enables:

A customer application to control the turbines remotely and access live and historical data, a current challenge for the industry.
Preventative maintenance via real-time data analysis.
Data analysis to monitor and understand the impact of decisions on journeys to net zero.
Transparency of data to, for example, open up data access for carbon accounting as part of companies’ decarbonization journeys.

Brian Bishop, CEO of DPC and OCF President commented: “Our work with Enturi is a perfect example of how a standardised approach to connectivity and trusted data is enhancing strategies across industries. As the renewable energy industry innovates, both organisations and consumers must have complete confidence that their data is safe. By using the OCF framework, DPC is able to not only comply with UK green energy metering requirements, but with ISO/IEC standards to ensure the secure communication of wind energy data.”

In February 2023, Enturi was awarded £98,000 of Innovate UK funding to accelerate system development through advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and rapid prototyping. Alex Shakeshaft, CEO and Co-Founder of Enturi, adds: “Monitoring and reporting on decarbonization in a secure yet transparent way is a huge challenge for the renewable energy industry. We are thrilled to collaborate with DPC to ensure both organisations and individuals can easily monitor and report on their sustainability goals. Our vision is to diversify clean technologies to enable businesses and communities to access renewable energy solutions to make significant contributions towards net zero goals, energy security, and energy costs.”

DPC is a Gold Member of OCF, a member-driven technical standards development organisation working to enable IoT devices and services to communicate through a trusted open internet protocol (IP) framework which dynamically aligns with baselines for IoT security and privacy regulations, offering peace of mind and enriched experiences. For more information about the OCF or to become a member, please visit the website.

-ENDS-

For further media information, please contact Fraser Kay: [email protected] / or on +44 (0) 113 350 1922

About the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF)

About Data Performance Consultancy Limited

The company has been carrying out research on smart cities and digital twins for over 10 years and currently sits on UKRI’s panel of experts, representing the UK Government on Smart City Missions and advising other governments to develop strategy and policy in this area. They have built a core architecture for a digital twin framework called Buttress and a front end application layer called nodeStream.

nodeStream is an enterprise-grade web3-native management tool that enables enterprises to gain full-depth insight into their supply chain. Most importantly nodeStream is designed to streamline supply-chain interactions saving time whilst improving visibility. For SME suppliers it simplifies and streamlines regulatory and procurement activities, saving time and maximising opportunities.

Key features:

Deep visibility into supply chains through validation and automation.
Many powerful, trustless interorganizational workflows for validation, compliance and productivity.
NSAudit is a DLT-backed enterprise audit tool that matches individuals to actions.
Powerful tools for interacting with suppliers through real-time workflows.
Suppliers typically interact with Nodestream daily.
Multi-tenant, private cloud or on-premise data hosting.
Mint unique NFTs for suppliers to own, to reflect attainment of procurement statuses.
Connectivity to the only ISO approved standard for IoT security.

The system connects disparate data sources, effectively breaking down organisational silos. It also includes a secure data governance and provenance model in which data is shared based on policy not just roles or attributes. The system allows organisations to control data at an asset level, share with their partners in real time and manage the whole of its lifecycle. The use of the DLT also provides governance, in that data is immutable, which is especially relevant for quality inspections.

About Enturi

Enturi Solutions is a pioneering UK start-up developing game-changing distributed renewable energy systems for a plethora of off-grid applications. Building on 2 years of design work, Enturi has developed and validated a pioneering patent-pending micro wind turbine design. Its unique design maximises efficiency. With this core technology, Enturi is developing portable distributed energy systems to maximise accessibility to renewable energy systems, as well as mitigate the current challenges associated with wind energy generation. Enturi aims to address energy diversity and security challenges, accelerate clean energy accessibility, as well as make significant contributions towards the decarbonisation targets.

Global IoT Standards Organizations, the OCF and FIWARE Foundation, Partner for Mutual Smart Data Models Adoption

Posted on: May 4, 2022

Both member organizations will benefit from the sharing of smart city, smart home and smart building data models and ISO/IEC standards

4 May, 2022 – The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) and FIWARE Foundation have formed a mutually beneficial partnership which provides members from both organizations with increased access to data models and standards that support the development of secure, interoperable Internet of Things (IoT) deployments.

The OCF is bringing a comprehensive set of smart home and smart building models to the table, across areas including air quality testing, carbon dioxide detection and blood pressure monitoring. FIWARE Foundation has provided access to its building blocks, reference architectures, smart city and industrial models.

Bruno Johnson, Chair of OCF Marketing and Communications Work Group, commented: “The collaboration is significant as it is opening up access to a wide array of data models which can speed up the development of secure infrastructure. FIWARE’s members can also swiftly adopt our Secure IP Device Framework to help create secure deployments with rapid development and simple integrations with IoT networks, and dynamically align these with baselines for IoT security and privacy regulations.”

As an ISO/IEC adopted standard, the OCF’s framework is internationally agreed upon by experts and is gaining adoption as a national standard in countries worldwide. With the OCF adopting FIWARE’s data models, in time, these too will be brought into the ISO/IEC standard.

Ulrich Ahle, CEO of FIWARE Foundation, confirmed: “We are thrilled about our collaboration with the OCF. Its extensive expertise and experience in contributing to the definition of technical standards across industries, following an implementation-driven open-source approach, will be invaluable as we work together to create and advance the adoption of smart data models for IoT devices and related-systems. It’s a perfect strategic fit. OCF’s commitment to collaboration and co-creation so that systems can be deployed in an open and standardized way dovetails with our goal to enable devices to communicate with one another, regardless of operating system, service provider, transport technology, or ecosystem.”

Over 65 data models defined by the OCF have already been made available in FIWARE’s Smart Data Models Program, with more than 200 soon to be adopted – contributing to the over 800 smart data models already provided through the FIWARE-driven program.

Bruno concluded: “By supporting the development of IoT technology in a secure and interoperable way, together we can further encourage its evolution and positive global impact.”

For more information about OCF or to become a member, please visit the website. For more information on FIWARE, FIWARE membership, and FIWARE Smart Data Models, find the website here.

OCF Deployed in Korea LH Smart Home Project

Posted on: December 7, 2021

Industry leadership from Korea Land and Housing Corporation overcomes significant IoT security, privacy and interoperability challenges with OCF

OCF is the Foundation for the Korea LH Smart Home Platform

07 December, 2021 – The Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH) has adopted the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) secure cloud-connected technology as the foundation for its national Smart Home Platform. This has helped LH to overcome significant IoT security, privacy and interoperability challenges. The initiative enhances residents’ living experiences through access to smart healthcare, intelligent safety systems, greater convenience through automation and improved energy management and control. All of this is achieved through the convenience and automation of the LH Smart Home.

Jin Meong Eo, Director of the Korea Land and Housing Corporation, adds: “We have made it our mission for all public housing to adopt smart homes. This is not only a response to the government’s digital policies. We are working to continue Korea’s leadership in innovation for the good of society. We are opening up access to healthcare, making living environments safer and saving energy to protect the world around us. OCF is one of the key components in helping us to achieve this in a secure, scalable way and that is why we chose OCF in our project.”

A secure- and private-by-design IoT smart hub in each home collects and analyzes IoT big data. It also features built-in fine dust and CO2 sensors, and helps residents to control 15 different types of device via an OCF-compliant Smart Home app. Based on this project, the goal is to continue to expand into public housing, with more than 223,000 households estimated by 2025.

Mr. Mark Trayer, Chairman of the OCF Board of Directors, comments: “Connecting IoT cloud environments with a range of devices and device types presents significant security, privacy and interoperability challenges. This is limiting consumers’ options and hindering market expansion. As governments work to connect infrastructure, proprietary IoT solutions can’t meet their requirements. Delivering a smart home service like this at scale both answers these challenges while improving tenants’ lives. This is true leadership from LH, and a model that can be replicated elsewhere.”

OCF collaborates with the IoT ecosystem to deploy and evolve the OCF ISO/IEC specifications, including the Secure IP Device Framework, its open-source reference implementation, and an industry-recognized certification program. All of this enables secure end-to-end implementations that encompass device-to-device, device-to-cloud, and cloud-to-cloud. The technology fosters competition, facilitates productivity, and drives innovation while aiding secure deployments with rapid development and simple integrations with IP networks and non-IP systems.

For more information on Open Connectivity Foundation and the Secure IP Device Framework, please visit: www.openconnectivity.org.