August 2020 - oneM2M members have recently approved a new work item on the topic of "System Enhancements to Support Data License Management". In this interview, Min-Byeong Lee from Hyundai Motors describes this work item and its importance in the evolution of IoT systems.
Q: Please describe your background and role within Hyundai Motors.
ML: I am a research engineer and for the past five years, I have been working in the Standards Strategy division of Hyundai Motor Company. My involvement with oneM2M dates back to 2018 and I have a strong interest in the automotive IoT field.
My main role in Hyundai Motor Company is to participate in the oneM2M standard and to develop a common IoT platform for the automotive industry. I am also a member of the Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA)'s oneM2M special group, which supports the oneM2M ecosystem in Korea. We promote oneM2M to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and developer communities. Some activities that the special group has completed include the publication of oneM2M developers' guidebooks, hosting oneM2M related seminars, and support for SMEs to participate in exhibitions and demonstrate their oneM2M products.
Q: What opportunities related to IoT is Hyundai Motors focused on?
ML: The Internet of Things (IoT) services, which aim to increase connectivity and compatibility, are expected to have widespread impacts on the automotive industry in the future. Hyundai Motor Company is developing several Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services for our clients to be launched in the near future. From an automaker perspective, we consider Car-to-Home / Home-to-Car services and, smart city related autonomous driving services as the main use cases.
Q: How and where does oneM2M fit in Hyundai Motor Company's plans?
ML: Hyundai Motor Company has been participating in oneM2M since 2018. Since then we have shown our interest through participation in various work items such as edge computing, 3GPP interworking, action triggering. These are some of the features required to manage and control vehicles. Now, Hyundai Motor Company is actively participating data related work in oneM2M as the topic of data management is becoming very important.
Q: As the rapporteur for the data licensing work item, how would you describe the activity?
ML: The aim of this work item is to standardize a framework for managing vast quantities of data on a license basis. That involves the development of support services to handle various types of open data. For example, we can expect to see an IoT version of DBPia which is an academic information portal that allows you to search through national journals and dissertations. We can extend this concept to IoT data by interconnecting machine-readable IoT open data for smart services, including automated driving and e-government IoT applications, to provide a searchable resource that covers all interconnected open IoT data generated from the government's public services. This will enable the provision of various data management services as intelligent IoT services and, intelligent recommendation services based on semantics.
Since oneM2M strongly promotes collaboration in all its activities, I would also like to mention several other members that are supporting this work item. They include Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI), Deutsche Telecom, Telecom Italia, Convida Wireless, BT and Orange.
Q: Why is data licensing becoming an important issue in IoT systems?
ML: Managing data is now very important not just to the vehicle domain but also all other IoT related domains. Once data is collected, another important issue is how to use it. This can involve sharing with other departments in an organization or, with external firms and application developers. One way to manage this is by attaching a license to a data set. Typically, a data license indicates the supplier of the data, the manner of delivery, maintenance and control of the data and data types. When downstream users of data have access to such information, it is much easier to use data properly.
Q: How will data licensing be integrated into the oneM2M architecture/framework?
ML: oneM2M has various features to manage data. For example, the oneM2M access control policy can manage who can do what (e.g., UPDATE and DELETE) to a resource. This new work item will allow oneM2M to add information about data license to existing onem2M resources in a standardized way. Then, data license information can be used by other features such as semantic search. For example, an application using semantics can discover all the open data that can be freely used, re-used, and redistributed by anyone.
Q: When can we expect to see the results of this work item?
ML: As more oneM2M members show their interest in this work item, we are hoping that it will become a prominent item in oneM2M Release 5. Note that there is a Release 5 work item on handling data privacy regulation, e.g., General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Therefore, 'DATA' is one of keywords in oneM2M Release 5.
The work item will investigate various data license models and how license information is used in other systems. Then a gap analysis will give a guideline of which features are not yet supported by oneM2M systems together along with potential requirements for standardization purposes. Such requirements will help to define new features that enhance oneM2M systems. We aim to conclude a technical report about this by early 2021 and transfer the results to normative specifications in 2021.
At the end of the day, we are hoping to see an application that uses this feature. An example area is linked open smart city IoT data which is similar to Linked open Data (LoD) on the web. In this case, open IoT data, under an open license, from various smart cities can be linked with other data so it becomes more useful for semantic queries. This becomes a powerful capability when different departments in a city or neighbouring cities use oneM2M standards which enable data interoperability.
