After nine years developing its software protocol to enable interoperability of smart street lighting systems and other smart city applications from multiple vendors, the TALQ Consortium announced it is sharing with the smart city community the detail of the TALQ OpenAPI Specification in the public domain.
The TALQ protocol (both the data model and API definitions) can now be found openly and free-of-charge on GitHub. This provides cities and other municipal authorities, commentators, consultants and potential members with the opportunity to view the details of the specification and to understand the advantages it brings.
Making the specification public allows manufacturers of Central Management Software (CMS) and Outdoor Device Networks (ODN, so called ‘Gateways’) to consider integrating the protocol into their own systems and to become interoperable with the solutions of other vendors.
The benefit to the smart city community is that there will be even more awareness of the specification – both vendors and cities – allowing them to profit from decades of Smart Outdoor Lighting and Smart City experience and prepare future-proof solutions, whilst at the same time opening the specification up to public scrutiny.
The TALQ OpenAPI definition provides developers with access to an extensive set of tools. Widely available documentation generation tools can be used to display the API, and code generation tools can create servers and clients in various programming languages. A wide range of testing and other tools is also available, all of which dramatically reduces the development effort for system manufacturers.
Compliance with the specification will remain restricted to member companies, who will retain access to the carefully designed Test Suite with which they can test their systems internally until they are ready for official TALQ certification. These test tools provide valuable diagnostic information to accelerate the integration of the TALQ OpenAPI Specification.
