Kepco joins Open Connectivity Foundation

Korea Electric Power Corporation has joined the Open Connectivity Foundation, making it the first energy company to join the group developing standards for connected devices, OCF Korea said Tuesday.

The Open Connectivity Foundation is an industry group developing specification standards to connect devices made by different brands. Set up in February last year, the OCF currently has around 300 member firms, including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Electrolux.

“We will provide energy integration solution for energy efficiency and power demand management by integrating our Internet of Things-based energy platform with the OCF standard,” a KEPCO spokesperson said.

On the same day, the OCF announced OCF standard 1.0, which is the first standard after two separate industry standard groups, AllSeen Alliance and Open Interconnect Consortium, were merged in October, last year.

The OCF standard 1.0 is comprised of a total of six specifications including core framework, interface, data model, smart home device message protocol, bridge and security.

“The OCF standard 1.0 is expected to be applied into diverse connected products and be settled as a common standard for IoT,” said Do Young-soo, a chairman of OCF Korea and senior vice president at Samsung Electronics’ digital control group. 

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)