Towards Interoperability of Entity-Based and Event-Based IoT Platforms: The Case of NGSI and EPCIS Standards

Yalew Tolcha,Davide Conzon,Ayalew Kassahun,Daeyoung Kim,Jarissa Maselyne,Georg Schwering,Teodoro Montanaro

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3069194

Abstract

With the advancement of IoT devices and thanks to the unprecedented visibility and transparency they provide, diverse IoT-based applications are being developed. With the proliferation of IoT, both the amount and type of data items captured have increased dramatically. The data generated by IoT devices reside in different organizations and systems, and a major barrier to utilizing the data is the lack of interoperability among the standards used to capture the data. To reduce this barrier, two major standards have emerged: the Global Standards One (GS1) Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS) and the FIWARE Next Generation Services Interface (NGSI). However, the two standards differ not only in the data encoding but also in the underlying philosophy of representing IoT data; namely, EPCIS is event-based, and NGSI is entity-based. Interoperability between FIWARE and EPCIS is essential for system integration. This paper presents OLIOT Mediation Gateway, now one of the incubated generic enablers offered by the FIWARE Foundation, that realizes the required interoperability between NGSI and EPCIS systems. It also demonstrates the applicability and feasibility of the Gateway by applying it to a real-life case study of integrating transparency systems used in a meat supply chain.

Highlights

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the network of devices that can autonomously capture data, process them, and act on them
Realizing transparency systems in the agri-food sector requires sharing data captured by IoT devices across the supply chain operators, including farmers, food processors, third parties, and retailers
This study considers a one-way translation from Next Generation Services Interface (NGSI) to Electronic Product Code Information Service (EPCIS), which is most needed

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the network of devices that can autonomously capture data, process them, and act on them. The Mediation Gateway (central part of Fig. 4) translates the information captured by the Context Broker in the form of NGSI entity data and capture into EPCIS events. The creation of EPCIS events is triggered every time a ‘‘significant state change’’ (attribute’s value change) occurs in the entity life history of the NGSI entity data model. This module’s main functionalities are to map the entity status change with the corresponding events and annotate the events with the context information as defined in EPCIS. The Mediation Gateway captures or updates EPCIS master data whenever there is any change and is responsible for mapping the local identification system used in FIWARE into the globally managed GS1 identification system

USE CASE

Findings

DISCUSSION AND EVALUATION

CONCLUSION