Industrial Internet: Towards Interoperability and Composability
ANSI and ISO, the Web Services and SOAP stacks from W3C and OASIS 28 , etc.) are
examples of this approach.
2. Common Components: The interacting systems are built with common components,
either from proprietary suppliers or, increasingly, from Open Source projects. All the
systems built on the Linux OS, for example, share pretty much the same Internet Protocol
(IP) stack (minus the Ethernet driver from individual device vendors). Another example is
the Open SSL library or the SSH29 program for Linux. There are countless other examples
in this category.
3. Open Source built on Standards: The interacting systems are built with common Open
Source components that are in turn built on standards. An excellent example of this
approach is the highly successful J2EE30 Java application development ecosystem.
4. Closed Ecosystem Framework: The interacting systems are built from proprietary
specifications from dominant market players. In this approach, everyone has to build to
the proprietary specifications or use proprietary components from the dominant players
in order to play in the specific ecosystem or market. For example, anyone who wants to
play in Apple’s home automation ecosystem must abide by the Apple specification. A
similar story exists for Google’s Brillo platform for Android.
5. Open Source Ecosystem Framework: Increasing numbers of new generations of solutions,
especially those of large-scale distributed systems from the Open Source arena, have
established themselves as de facto open standards because of the dominant position they
have established due to their success. Anyone who wants to use or interact with these
systems often must adapt to the interfaces implemented by these solutions (often
without a formal specification – the implementation being the specification). The Hadoop
ecosystem and solutions in the application container area are good examples of this
approach. In these systems, as long as you use the components provided from the
ecosystem, interoperability is virtually ensured within these systems.
Clea rly, all of these approaches have enabled interoperability in their respective environments
or ecosystems and they continue to evolve. The Open Source movement is the latest force that
28
RFC: Request for Comments, IETF: Internet Engineering Task Force; IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers; ETSI: European Telecommunications Standards Institute; SQL: Structured Query Language; ANSI:
American National Standards Institute; ISO: International Organization for Standardization; SOAP: Simple Object
Access Protocol; W3C: World Wide Web Consortium; OASIS: Advancing open standards for the information society .
29
SSL: Secure Sockets Layer; SSH: Secure Shell
30
J2EE: Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition
IIC Journal of Innovation
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