Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT, 53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany.
Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 Jun 10;21(12):4010. doi: 10.3390/s21124010.
Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) is pervasive and characterized by the rapid growth of IoT platforms across different application domains, enabling a variety of business models and revenue streams. This opens new opportunities for companies to extend their collaborative networks and develop innovative cross-platform and cross-domain applications. However, the heterogeneity of today's platforms is a major roadblock for mass creation of IoT platform ecosystems, pointing at the current absence of technology enablers for an easy and innovative composition of tools/services from the existing platforms. In this paper, we present the Data Spine, a federated platform enabler that bridges IoT interoperability gaps and enables the creation of an ecosystem of heterogeneous IoT platforms in the manufacturing domain. The Data Spine allows the ecosystem to be extensible to meet the need for incorporating new tools/services and platforms. We present a reference implementation of the Data Spine and a quantitative evaluation to demonstrate adequate performance of the system. The evaluation suggests that the Data Spine provides a multitude of advantages (single sign-on, provision of a low-code development environment to support interoperability and an easy and intuitive creation of cross-platform applications, etc.) over the traditional approach of users joining multiple platforms separately.
如今，物联网（IoT）无处不在，其特点是不同应用领域的物联网平台迅速发展，这为企业提供了各种商业模式和收入来源。这为公司扩展其协作网络和开发创新的跨平台和跨领域应用程序提供了新的机会。然而，当今平台的异构性是大规模创建物联网平台生态系统的主要障碍，这表明目前缺乏技术手段来轻松地从现有平台创新组合工具/服务。在本文中，我们提出了 Data Spine，这是一个联邦平台启用器，它可以弥合物联网互操作性差距，并在制造业领域创建异构物联网平台的生态系统。Data Spine 允许生态系统进行扩展，以满足纳入新工具/服务和平台的需求。我们展示了 Data Spine 的参考实现和定量评估，以证明系统的足够性能。评估表明，与用户分别加入多个平台的传统方法相比，Data Spine 具有许多优势（单点登录、提供支持互操作性的低代码开发环境以及轻松直观地创建跨平台应用程序等）。
