The US-based Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has launched version 2.1 of its Industrial Internet Vocabulary Technical Report.
The IIC is a leading organisation which aims to accelerate the adoption of Industrial Internet of Things technologies for the benefit of business and society. The organisation’s Industrial Internet Vocabulary Technical Report provides a common set of definitions for Internet of Things-related terms, and is designed to standardise the use of such terminology with a view to reducing confusion in the IoT marketplace.
Because the development of new technologies now moves at an unprecedented pace across all sectors, new vocabulary is always needed to refer to novel developments. To avoid confusion in the marketplace for such technologies, standardisation of terminology is vital, and the Industrial Internet Vocabulary Technical Report provides definitions and examples of usage for a variety of newly coined terms.
The most recent edition of the technical report adds a number of new terms that are now widely used across many vertical industries, including:
- Data management;
- Edge computing;
- IT/OT convergence;
- Connectivity;
- Interoperability;
- Brownfield development; and
- Greenfield development.
How big of a problem is the misuse of terms in IoT marketplaces?
According to Anish Karmarkar, senior director of standards strategy and architecture at Oracle and co-editor of the report: “People from different backgrounds and different vertical industries will often use different terms to mean the same thing. Additionally, the industrial internet has core concepts that mean different things to different people. Without an agreed upon vocabulary, there’s a lot of room for misunderstandings.”
The report defines a number of terms related to data management, including ‘data at rest’, ‘data in motion’, and ‘data integrity’, which could prove vital for stakeholders in the expanding smart cities sector, particularly as more innovations rely on data from citizens. This is also increasingly important given the increasingly global focus of many such projects.
