Two leading ‘connectivity’ organizations are to collaborate on open standards and envision a standardized approach for connected cars to interact with new smart technologies in homes and neighborhoods globally.
The Genivi Alliance, which is a community developing open source software and standards for the connected car, and the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), a leading Internet of Things (IoT) standards body, have announced a new liaison agreement. Under the collaboration the two organizations will co-develop open standards for vehicle connectivity and vehicle data exchange, including a unified model for secure discovery and exchange of information between smart homes, connected cars and other IoT devices. The joint effort will also address end-to-end security challenges, and will be the basis for a growing number of V2X (vehicle-to-everything) solutions, enabling new opportunities across multiple verticals.
Under the new agreement, Genivi and OCF will also closely collaborate with the W3C Automotive Working Group, which develops an Open Web Platform API specification, to expose vehicle data to web application developers. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2017) in Las Vegas, Nevada, the two organizations demonstrated a smart home gateway that featured vehicle-to-smart-home connectivity utilizing Genivi Remote Vehicle Interaction (RVI), Vehicle Signal Specification (VSS) and OCF’s loTivity technologies.
The well-received demonstration displayed visionary approaches on how connected vehicles can interact with IoT and the smart home. RVI is open source software that enables connected vehicles to communicate and interact in real time with municipal infrastructures, data centers, public transportation, and other connected vehicles of all kinds. In 2017, Genivi plans to field test RVI in a smart city context as well as fully deploy RVI in the Genivi Development Platform (GDP).
Headquartered in San Ramon, California, the Genivi Alliance is a non-profit alliance focused on developing an open in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) and connectivity platform for the transportation industry. The alliance provides its members with a global networking community of more than 140 companies, joining connected car stakeholders with world-class developers in a collaborative environment, resulting in free, open source middleware.
Oregon-based OCF has created a specification and is sponsoring an open source project to enable billions of connected devices, such as phones, computers and sensors, to communicate with one another regardless of manufacturer, operating system, chipset or physical transport.
“OCF believes in technology partnerships that will help drive our vision of ensuring secure interoperability for consumers and business, across multiple industry verticals,” explained Joonho Park, executive director of OCF. “We are excited about today’s announcement which helps us build on our momentum to deliver specifications and open source components that will benefit the entire IoT ecosystem. We’ve had a productive, year-long collaboration with Genivi, resulting in open source contributions to key IoT projects and technology demonstrations at CES 2017 that were received extremely well by attendees.”