ETSI launches IoT Ontology for automotive, eHealth, wearables and water distribution

Sophia Antipolis -- The ETSI SmartM2M technical committee is pleased to confirm it has extended its IoT SAREF ontology with four new sectors addressing the automotive, eHealth/Ageing-well, wearable and water domains. The Smart Applications REFerence (SAREF) ontology is intended to enable interoperability between solutions from different providers and within various activity sectors in the Internet of Things (IoT), thus contributing to the development of the global digital market. SmartM2M has already developed six extensions, now supplemented with these four new specifications.

The six extensions already released address the following sectors: Energy, Environment, Building, Smart Cities, Industry and Manufacturing, and Smart Agriculture and Food Chain. ETSI SAREF extensions are structured into two parts, with the first describing the ontology and semantics of the sector and the second focusing on specific use cases as examples. These are designed to evolve with new use cases to meet industry needs and requirements.

“SAREF answers industry requirements for understanding the information carried by the data. It is therefore an essential complement to the ETSI IoT technical specifications landscape, as it integrates the communication protocols and systems with ontology and semantic support. SAREF and oneM2M provide a perfect combination to assure IoT interoperability across business sectors and different protocols,” explains Enrico Scarrone, ETSI TC SmartM2M Chair.

SAREF adheres to these fundamental principles:

• Reuse and alignment of concepts and relationships that are defined in existing assets
• Modularity to allow the separation and recombination of different parts of the ontology depending on specific needs
• Extensibility to allow the ontology to be expanded further
• Maintainability to facilitate the process of identifying and correcting defects, accommodate new requirements, and handle changes in (parts of) SAREF

SAREF4AUTO defined in ETSI TS 103 410-7 provides ontology and semantics for the automotive domain and focuses on three use cases: platooning, Automated Valet Parking (AVP) and vehicle environments with Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs).

SAREF4EHAW defined in ETSI TS 103 410-8 provides ontology and semantics for the eHealth/Ageing-well domain and focuses on two use cases: monitoring and supporting healthy lifestyles for citizens, in the current context of COVID-19, and Early Warning Systems (EWSs) for Cardiovascular Accidents.

SAREF4WEAR defined in ETSI TS 103 410-9 provides ontology and semantics for wearable devices. The use case is a healthcare scenario where the wearer is represented by a user equipped with wearable devices whose purpose is to monitor health parameters and inform the user in real time about their status. Another scenario is that of open-air public events, such as street festivals.

SAREF4WATR defined in ETSI TS 103 410-10 provides ontology and semantics for water-related applications. One use case focuses on a water meter, another depicts water distribution infrastructure for drinking water intended for domestic use, while the third contains an example of a key performance indicator.

The SAREF work is now available on a dedicated SAREF website.