by Angela Guess

Adrian Bridgwater of Forbes recently wrote, “The fact that we are surrounded by so many IoT-related messages is surely confusing. We have started to try and clarify the issue by talking about the Internet of Things That Matter (IoTTM) or the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to denote IoT devices in industry from smart cities to manufacturing to aeronautical applications and onwards… Regardless of which side of the IoT fence you sit on, the existence of these new ‘things’ depends upon seven crucial C-words. This story originates from an original idea, concept and proposal made by and attributed to Wael Elrifai, director of enterprise solutions and officially appointed ‘data guru’ at Pentaho. Elrifai in fact proposes five Cs of the IoT, but we have ‘top ‘n tailed’ his theory for editorialization — and because 7 is always better than 5, wherever you are.”

Bridgwater’s list begins, “(1) Consumption: The first stage of the IoT is always consumption. We could also use the word ‘ingestion’ here i.e. we need to build devices that are capable of producing operational data so that we can consume it into our IT structures. (2) Connection: The existence of smart connections (from sensors and other types of connection points) are essential avenues for IoT construction. Only when we have connectivity to the IoT can we start to build intelligence around the data that it produces. (3) Conversion: This is the crucial stage that sees us take raw sensor data and convert it into contextualized meaning. Applying human reasoning to raw data is simply not possible, we need to expand the 1s and Os that the machines produce and start to know what information matters where, when and why — this after all is what context is all about.”

Read the rest of the list here.

photo credit: Flickr/ takomabibelot