VICINITY
The lack of interoperability is considered as the most important barrier to achieve the global integration of IoT ecosystems across borders of different disciplines, vendors and standards. Indeed, the current IoT landscape consists of a large set of isolated islands that do not constitute a real internet, preventing the exploitation of the huge potential expected by ICT visionaries.
VICINITY will build and demonstrate a device and standard agnostic platform for IoT infrastructures that will offer "Interoperability as a Service". It will rely on a decentralised and user-centric approach that offer a complete transparency across vertical domains while retaining full control of the ownership and distribution of data.
The primary aim of the VICINITY project is to provide the owners of connected IoT infrastructures with a decentralized interoperability. The concept of decentralism is expressed by the fact that the platform includes neither central operator roles, nor central databases to store sensitive data about users. Instead of that, it connects different smart objects into a “social network” called virtual neighbourhood where infrastructure owners keep under control their shared devices and data thanks to web based operator console called VICINITY neighbourhood manager (VNM). Guest IoT infrastructures, VICINITY enabled services as well as the VICINITY auto-discovery space are connected to a VICINITY interoperability gateway using the same VICINITY gateway API.
Participants
People involved in the development of the project:
