The Evolution of a Standard
In this four part series, ONVIF Steering Committee Chair Per Björkdahl discusses how ONVIF the organization was founded and how its standards have evolved over the last nine years.
ONVIF has achieved a lot since its founding in 2008. The member consortium began as a small group of manufacturers that wanted to collaborate to accelerate the acceptance of systems based on network surveillance cameras. While ONVIF’s mission hasn’t changed significantly since then, its application and influence has: ONVIF is now an industry alliance for the physical security industry.
ONVIF has become a well-known, international organization with robust membership and there are more than 7,000 ONVIF-conformant products in the market today. With members on six continents, our specifications for video and access control have also recently been adopted by the International Electrical Commission, one of the world’s most influential standards organizations. Not bad in nine years.
Like many other standards, ONVIF has evolved incrementally and its development, use and acceptance have as well. The journey ONVIF is on is actually quite typical for a standards organization. Other standards such as IEC, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), HDMI and Bluetooth have experienced similar ebbs and flows, hurdles, successes and acceptance in many of the same ways that ONVIF has.
Over time, these organizations have expanded the scope of their standards, changed their approaches to standardization when needed and have dealt with issues of false conformance, just as ONVIF has.
Building a Foundation
Standards organizations are often founded to create, at least initially, one specific kind of benchmark within an industry. ONVIF was founded by Axis, Sony and Bosch to create a global standard for the interface of network cameras and video management systems in order to be an alternative to the very much standardized analog CCTV industry. The organization sought to provide greater freedom of choice so installers and end users can select interoperable products from a variety of different vendors.
By establishing a basic standard for video in its early days, the founders also hoped to simplify product development for manufacturers. The philosophy was that establishing a basic integration standard within the industry would allow developers to spend more time on creating innovative features and designs and less effort on creating multiple APIs for simple integrations between products.
Even in its early days, ONVIF made some significant achievements, most notably by creating and releasing its first specification soon after its founding. When the first specification was deployed for real world use, ONVIF realized it had to make some adjustments to its approach to creating a standard. Although members had agreed on how to specify APIs for video, the way the manufacturers actually deployed these in their products varied.
All the members were following the specification, but there was not agreement on which features to support. For example, a camera manufacturer may have only implemented specific video functions to interact with another manufacturer’s VMS using ONVIF, but that particular VMS supports many additional functions of that camera. So when users of the VMS expected to be able to utilize a specific function in the camera, it was not supported through ONVIF. All of which gave room for some doubts regarding the usability of the standard.
ONVIF is an open industry forum that provides and promotes standardized interfaces for effective interoperability of IP-based physical security products. Stay tuned for parts two through four of this four-part series, which will be posted shortly. For more information on ONVIF, visit www.onvif.org.
