Happy World Standards Day!

Today 14 October is World Standards Day. A day to celebrate the enormous collaboration of experts working on standards to enable a better world. Open standards are not just an enabler for innovation – they make innovation accessible to the whole world. In this post we want to highlight the work that Sirus is doing in the standard space and celebrate all the experts that join us in this effort.

We as Sirus actively help to drive Open Standards for smart cities. Through our platform the Sirus Smart City Store we help cities and regions gain control and ownership back over their data that is collected in the city. Not only do we provide the data in a standardized format based on the OASC data models but the data is also accessible through an NGSI-LD based API.

I’m sorry – NGSI-L-what?

NGSI-LD is a specification that enables the distribution and management of context information of IoT devices and city databases. So it’s an API – and an underlying data model.

The power of NGSI-LD lies in linking the data of a sensor to its context. Because why would you be interested in knowing that the fill level of garbage bin nr. 3958 is 75, if you don’t know that it’s located at Jubelpark, that this was measured 3 days ago, and that its capacity is 80?

This enables ecosystems of citizens, companies, research institutes and governments to use this data to build city applications or do research that solve local problems, benefitting citizens, business, and decision makers.

How Sirus is making a difference

Next to the platform that we offer to cities, we are actively involved in the working groups of the technical council of OASC. The personal data working group defines the specification based on open standards for Personal Data based on Solid and MyData.org. This will help citizens to gain back control and management of their personal data.It allows them to have a clear insight on the use of their personal data through open standards.

The working group Fair AI will help drive the initiatives of the cities of Amsterdam and Helsinki in this area to other cities. The cities Helsinki and Amsterdam have created registries of the algorithms used in their city.

Sirus helps defining the NGSI-LD standard as member of the Special Task Force of ETSI. ETSI enables companies to develop NGSI-LD compliant context brokers trough validated test suites.

In the living-in.eu initiative we are actively involved in determining the specifications of the MIMs+ document. The purpose of the document is to help cities to enable the digital transformation and help the cities to tackle the modern day challenges.

For ITU we lead Working Group 3 of United 4 Smart Sustainable Cities regarding the specification of the urban data platforms for smart cities.

These different initiatives help drive innovation and ecosystems we need to be able the achieve the sustainable development goals, like SDG11.

Happy World Standards Day!

So happy world standards day! And as the boy-scouts say: Leave the campground cleaner than you found it!

Winning design of the World Standards Day 2020 poster competition by Jyoti Bisht

Author: Gert De Tant