ANSI held it’s Spring 2014 Company Member Council (CMC) meeting in San Diego this year, with Qualcomm hosting. I attended and found the meeting to be very informative. One of the four major topics was interoperability, and the concepts of “smartness” and “infrastructure” were referred to frequently. Since community infrastructure is a priority at the International level, standards activities are supporting that effort. And the release of the new ISO/TR 37150, “Smart community infrastructures – Review of existing activities relevant to metrics,” provides background information to support relevant standards development.
The idea behind “Smart” (whether it’s the Smart Grid, Smart Cars, Smart Homes, etc.) is the implementation of computer-aided communication (interoperability) to provide remote access, monitoring, and diagnostics via the “Internet of Things” (IOT). The impact that this transformation of our infrastructure will have is affecting business and standards across many sectors. For example, with community infrastructure discussed in the ISO 37150, primary areas of focus are energy, transportation, water, waste, and ICT (Information and Communications Technology).
In order to get a handle on existing information and projects in process, the committee collected and reviewed material on Standards and Frameworks already in existence and on various projects currently underway around the world. These documents and projects were defined in part by using the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). These goals were referenced a number of times in the ANSI presentations on Interoperability as well.
The process by which all the information was collected included a questionnaire, with results published in Annex B. Literature and internet surveys rounded out the effort. This included both searches for documents and for projects, and was broadly based to avoid excluding specific regions or different concepts of smartness or interoperability. You’ll find a list of the identified activities in Annex A with a detailed review of the results presented in Annex D.
The committee wraps up the document with a discussion of future directions. First is a review of attributes that would provide a positive set of smart community infrastructure metrics in general. Other aspects of the concept are also discussed — their thinking on metrics, community, smart and infrastructure are all addressed. Then the committee provides you with a gap analysis, to suggest areas where further standardization efforts may be required. Other possible related areas that should be investigated are also presented.
As a wide variety of industries recognize the inherent convergence of technologies surrounding the potential of the IOT, standardization is following suit. These initial reports like the ISO/TR 37150 provide the groundwork for what will surely be an ambitious standardization work program in the future.
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