One week after AT&T announced its Network 3.0, or Indigo, data-sharing project aimed at helping organizations share data and collaborate on analytics, ETSI has announced an initiative geared toward helping organizations deliver context to their data to make it more valuable.

Called Context Information Management (CIM), ETSI has created an industry specification group on CIM (ISG CIM) that will meet in early February in Sophia Antipolis, France, to work on a CIM system that will act as a clearinghouse for data that is relevant to Internet of Things (IoT) applications like smart cities.

Specifically, the ISG CIM will determine protocols that will run on top of IoT platforms and allow data to be exchanged and given context. The types of information that gives data context are things like: what the data describes, how it was measured, and when it was measured.

ETSI notes that data without context is meaningless, and that software programs that currently can search for useful information will only find data if the context is available.

“With the rapid development of technologies such as big data, semantic web, complex workflow, or autonomous decision making, the need for interoperable context information is becoming huge,” says Lindsay Frost, convenor of ETSI ISG CIM.

The ETSI initiative comes on the heels of AT&T’s news, but both are intended to give data more value and make it sharable without running into security or privacy issues.

When AT&T announced the program last week at its 2017 Developer Summit, John Donovan, chief strategy officer of AT&T, said the idea behind Indigo was to create a data-sharing environment and incorporate tools like identity management and policy engine so that companies can share their data with each other without compromising privacy. An example he gave was hospitals being able to share research data without providing patient information.

In an interview with SDxCentral about Indigo, Victor Nilson, senior vice president of big data at AT&T, said that data is rapidly becoming the most important asset for companies, but it's a huge problem not to have context. And data must be shared without exposing it to hackers.

ETSI’s ISG CIM will focus on developing specifications for a common context information management API, data publication platforms, and standard data models. The group will work closely with the ETSI SmartM2M technical committee and with oneM2M, the global standards initiative for M2M and the IoT, of which ETSI is a founding member.