Eclipse Foundation announces Sparkplug as international standard

The Eclipse Foundation, in collaboration with the Eclipse Sparkplug Working Group, announced that the Sparkplug 3.0 specification has been published as an international standard by the ISO and IEC Joint Technical Committee (JTC 1) for information technology.

Going forward, the Sparkplug specification will also be known as ISO/IEC 20237, although the Eclipse Foundation says it will continue to maintain the specification and intends to submit future revisions. In addition, the Sparkplug Working Group says it is launching a product compatibility program to maintain interoperability.

Sparkplug is an open OT software specification for how Edge of Network (EoN) gateways or native MQTT-enabled devices and applications communicate bi-directionally within an MQTT infrastructure. Sparkplug 3.0 is the latest update, released in early 2023, to the more widely recognized Sparkplug B specification.

By design, the MQTT specification doesn’t dictate a topic namespace or any payload encoding, but that can inhibit interoperability. To address that, Sparkplug adds to MQTT by defining an OT-centric topic namespace and payload definition within an MQTT infrastructure. It also defines MQTT session state management required by real-time SCADA systems.
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