The White House announced yesterday that the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners, including the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), have established a new international coalition dedicated to developing an Internet of Things-Enabled Smart City (IES-City) Framework, with an initial release planned for next summer.
Through an open, technical working group studying real-world smart city applications and architectures, the cross-sector coalition will identify pivotal points of interoperability to enable a landscape of diverse but interoperable smart city solutions. Along with ANSI and NIST, coalition members include the U.S. Green Building Council; the Republic of Korea's Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning; the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development; the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI); and the FIWARE Foundation.
Working with city stakeholders, the group will perform a comparative analysis of existing architectural efforts with the goal of producing a framework document that can be used to bring greater coherence to standardization activities taking place internationally in various standards developing organizations and consortia.
ANSI's role is primarily outreach and awareness-raising to encourage technical experts to participate in the project, and ultimately to use the working group's output in subsequent standards activities in which ANSI plays a role as coordinator of the U.S. standardization system and U.S. member to international standards bodies.
In July, ANSI hosted a free informational webinar on the IES-City Framework as part of the monthly webinars of the ANSI Network on Smart and Sustainable Cities (ANSSC), a forum for information sharing and coordination on voluntary standards, conformity assessment, and related activities for smart and sustainable cities in the U.S. and abroad. For more information on the ANSSC, please visit the official webpage.