Government investment drives UK lead in IoT

ENGLAND, UK: A consortium of more than 40 UK-based technology companies funded by the UK's innovation agency, Technology Strategy Board, has delivered on the first phase of its initiative to accelerate the widespread move to the Internet of Things (IoT).

HyperCat is a new open IoT specification that allows machines to work together over the Internet and for applications to discover and make sense of data automatically without human intervention.

In just 12 months and with £6.4 million funding from the Technology Strategy Board, development teams from major companies including ARM, BT and IBM have worked alongside UK start-ups and UK University Departments to break down vertical data silos and find a foundation for connected products and applications to interoperate.

The HyperCat specification is an extremely simple yet powerful, thin interoperability layer for the IoT, which allows applications to explore what data and resources are available on a specific data hub, or search for particular types of resource across the Internet.

For example, if an application only understands temperature measurements, HyperCat provide a means to search for and discover this type of data - buried amongst other data that the application may not understand.