Thingful was a search engine for the Internet of Things, providing a unique geographical index of real-time data from connected objects around the world, including energy, radiation, weather, and air quality devices as well as seismographs, iBeacons, ships, aircraft and even animal trackers.
Umbrellium's second spin-out, originally accessible at Thingful.net, indexed thousands of IoT platforms, infrastructures and resources, enabling people to search and find devices, datasets and realtime data sources by geolocation. Millions of connected objects & sensors across the planet generate real-time open data. Thingful's Datapipes made it quick and easy to find and use open IoT data.
Examples of Thingful in use included:
- London's first autonomous vehicle pilot
- using machine learning to fill in missing dat
- finding & acquiring real-time urban IoT data from across the data spectrum
- London's first autonomous vehicle pilot
- real-time data permissions management for connected car infrastructure – make data securely available to 3rd parties
- We were part of the authoring team on British Standard PAS 212 / Hypercat - Automatic Resource Discovery for the Internet of Things
- IoT data visualisation and experimentation platform for Singapore's National Institute of Education (NIE), enabling staff and students to gather, analyse and process open IoT data from around the world
If you are concerned about asthma, find out about any air quality monitors in your neighbourhood; somebody working with a Raspberry Pi can find others round the corner using the same computing platform; if you notice a ship moored nearby, discover more about it by tracking it on Thingful, or get notified of its movements; a citizen concerned about flooding in a new neighbourhood can look up nearby flood monitors or find others that have been measuring radiation. You might even watch the weekly movements of a shark as it explores the oceans.
Thingful also enables people and companies to claim and verify ownership of their things using a provenance mechanism, thereby giving them a single web page that aggregates information from all their connected devices no matter what network they're on, in categories that include health, environment, home, transport, energy and flora & fauna. Users can also add objects to a Watchlist in order to keep track of them, monitor their realtime status and get notifications when they change. See Thingful around the world.
Thingful was created by Umbrellium before being spun out in 2014 into a separate company led by Usman Haque, Sam Mulube, Andrew Caleya Chetty and Dot Samsen and eventually sunsetted in 2022. Its interoperability & discoverability technologies have been key components of H2020 projects such as the DECODE Project (to provides tools that put individuals in control of whether they keep their personal data private or share it for the public good) and GROW Observatory (a citizen's observatory to take action on climate, build better soil & grow healthier food), as well as Connected Vehicle project on Leveraging real-time IoT Data funded through the Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles.