CSIRO in European cloud push
CSIRO ICT has signed up for a four year European project to design an open platform that will help the masses of sensor networks forming around the world to communicate through the internet and eventually be sold as services.
Called the Open Internet of Things, the project is being run in conjunction with Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, as well as Ireland’s Deri Galway University, and Switzerland’s EPFL under the EU’s Framework research funding scheme.
Other participants in the 4.2 million euro ($5.23m) project which got underway two weeks ago are Greece’s Research and Education Laboratory and software outfit P. Dimitropoulos and Britain’s IT Association.
The idea, according to CSIRO ICT deputy director Darrell Williamson, is to build a platform that will allow sensor networks — everything from radio-frequency identification chips to soil moisture sensors — to communicate through the cloud (internet).
“Everything in the cloud is virtual and you don’t care where things are located, but when you have real things like sensors and you are trying to do real experiments you have challenges.
“You don’t want the platform to be proprietary,” Mr Williamson said at CeBIT Hannover.
“Any core infrastructure should be open source. You build commercial solutions on top, around water, power or whatever, but you want the railroad tracks to be open source.”
The project will develop an open source middleware stack for internet connected objects.
