Badajoz Is More - the journey to become a smart province

Badajoz uses Context Broker to digitally connect public administrations, local businesses and citizens to increase innovation, entrepreneurship and overall quality of life.

The city of Badajoz in the province of Badajoz. Image by Juan Glez / Pixabay.

Quick facts

• Organisation: Provincial Council of Badajoz, in Extremadura, western Spain
• Project: Badajoz Is More
• Challenge: How to create sustainable development and prevent rural exodus
• Solution: An innovation ecosystem and a central platform for smart services powered by FIWARE Context Broker
• Building Block: Context Broker
• EU funded: No

Sustainable development through technology

Even though Badajoz is rather sparsely populated, it is the largest province in Spain, located in the western part of the country. For years, the region has seen young citizens emigrate to more urban areas in search of jobs and a better quality of life. In 2018, the Provincial Council of Badajoz embarked on an ambitious initiative, called ‘Badajoz Is More’, to increase the attractiveness of the region by using technology.

The 'Badajoz Is More' initiative provides tools and services based on Internet of Things (IoT) and big data technologies in order to foster sustainable development by turning Badajoz into a smart province. Badajoz envisioned bridging the digital gap between urban and non-urban areas in order to avoid rural exodus. To do this, the provincial council decided to improve the cost-efficiency of municipal services by centralising all services into a single smart platform that would optimise internal processes, increase transparency, enhance the overall effectiveness of decisions, and empower citizens with more knowledge and control through intuitive, digital public services. They also wanted to use technology to promote local entrepreneurship and job creation.

Three-track implementation

To fully realise this initiative, work was divided into three tracks:

1. Implementation of the central platform: ‘Provincial Platform for Smart Public Services Management’
2. Creation of a Technical Office for strategic, technological and administrative activities
3. Creation of an Innovation Ecosystem to promote entrepreneurship and job creation

The ‘Provincial Platform for Smart Public Services Management’ is the central platform, which collects and processes data from the Badajoz Provincial Council and the different town halls. After the platform was created, the team connected IoT-based smart solutions to it, starting from Smart Waste Management, Smart Water Cycle Management, and Smart Street Lighting. The data collection from different sources and their collective analysis are enabled by Context Broker, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme's Building Block for making data driven decisions in real time, at the right time. The services and support offered by the European Commission's CEF programme are based on the technical specifications defined by FIWARE, an association for promoting open and interoperable IoT-based smart services.

As is shown in the illustration below, there are two different dashboards to visualise information. One is an executive dashboard with management reports and service management indicators. The other is an operational dashboard to display real-time status indicators and predictive analytics. With the platform, all connected public administrations will be able to manage, monitor and control smart services for informed, efficient and transparent decisions.

@Illustration by the Provincial Council of Badajoz

The Technical Office performs strategic, technological and administrative activities for the project. For example, it provides indicators on resource efficiency, service activity and overall territory benchmarking, which are provided by Context Broker.

The creation of the Innovation Ecosystem around technologies aims to promote entrepreneurship and job creation in the Badajoz region. The ecosystem serves as a meeting point between entrepreneurs, educational entities, local businesses, public entities and citizens to discuss and identify development and business opportunities brought by the new technologies. This ecosystem provides the community with a central contact point to learn and experiment with digital tools and services. 

Results and benefits

The Badajoz Provincial Council has successfully provided digital services to municipalities, local businesses, educational entities, citizens and other stakeholders in the region. With the smart city expertise shared with local entities, the initiative was also able to digitally connect with sparsely populated areas. Through Context Broker, Badajoz now has a highly scalable, flexible and interoperable solution for smart services. The platform is secure, reliable and based on a vendor-neutral, open-source technology. This means that it will be easy for anyone to connect their IoT-based service to the platform and offer it to anyone they want. 

Context Broker provides a flexible and highly scalable foundation on which, the province can easily connect new IoT and big data based public services regardless of technology or vendor.

'Badajoz Is More' has something to offer for everyone:

• Public administrations - better management of services and more informed decision making
• Citizens - improved quality of public services provided
• Service providers - possibility to offer improved services
• ICT sector - promotion of innovation, cooperation and new business development

More smart services in the future

In the future, the province plans to further pilot smart services in other areas, such as in managing parking, tourism, and sports facilities. These pilots will also be integrated into the same ‘Provincial Platform of Smart Public Service Management’, due to the vast data collection abilities of Context Broker.

The province aims to become the national reference for smart territory solutions. It will continue to create synergies between local businesses, start-ups and public administrations to further expand the free flow of information in order to connect communities.

eInvoicing Ireland and CEF Digital Implementation Workshop

In March 2019, eInvoicing Ireland and CEF Digital Implementation Workshop provided detailed information on the European standard on eInvoicing in Directive 2014/55/EU. 

An eInvoice is an invoice issued, transmitted and received in a structured data format that allows for its automatic and electronic processing. Businesses and public administrations throughout Europe benefit from the adoption of eInvoicing in terms of both reduced costs and environmental impact. The European standard on eInvoicing reduces the number of standards and specifications limiting market opportunities for suppliers and contractors and ultimately impeding Europe’s Single Market.

Building the eInvoicing community in Ireland among the public sector bodies really started in earnest following the eInvoicing Ireland and CEF Digital event in 2018. Last month’s event attracted over 210 delegates representing public sector bodies.

The workshop proved timely ahead of the 18 April 2019 legal deadline for the transposition of the Directive into national law and implementation of the European standard (by authorities at central level).  The workshop’s hosts, eInvoicing Ireland, particularly welcomed the opportunity to bring the relevant people across the public sector together in a single workshop and provide them with all the information they need to implement eInvoicing, forming an invaluable part of the national approach to facilitating eInvoicing implementation in Ireland.

The Commission will continue to provide such workshops, trainings or webinars to interested Member States until 2020, promoting the uptake of eInvoicing, the European standard and other relevant CEF Building Blocks.

The implementation workshops are provided in English and are offered on-site or remotely (online). The contents can be tailored to your specific needs, with a duration ranging from half a day to two days. Please note that the workshops are available at no cost but on a first-come first-served basis. The host country to facilitate logistics (including provision of facilities) and to identify and invite participants from both private and public sector.

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CEF BDTI Webinar: Experiment with Big Data - Download the Materials

On the 19 of March 2019, the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) team in the European Commission held a webinar on experimenting with Big Data in the public sector.

Data is a strategic asset, and all governments should be able to leverage on it. In the public sector, data is used to inform and shape the views of countless policymakers, politicians, public sector officers, academics and guide millions of euros worth of investment. However, as digital data expands and becomes more complex, information management becomes more complex as well.

The European Commission, through the CEF Digital programme, offers the BDTI Building Block to support you when testing Big Data. CEF BDTI services are free of charge, cross-border, open-source and tested.

Visit the event page to download the slides and see the recordings.

Download the materials

CEF Building Blocks Presented at Danube Ports in the Digital Age: Challenges & Opportunities

©Pixabay

On 11 April 2019, the European Commission presented the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Blocks at the event Danube Ports in the Digital Age: Challenges & Opportunities in Vienna, Austria.

The digitalisation of Danube ports’ businesses processes affects various aspects of a port's administration and organisation. In maritime transport, actors increasingly submit, manage and store notifications, declarations, certifications, requests and service orders in electronic, rather than paper, format. Digitalisation also means facilitating the recognition of professional qualifications in inland navigation through information systems, or supporting vessel tracking & tracing. Nevertheless, close to 99% of freight transport operations within the EU still use paper documents. This translates to 380 million hours in total spent processing paper based transport information (total EU, 2018 estimate).

In this context, the Danube Ports Network organised this conference to address what digital means for Danube port administrators and operators and their core business. Danube Ports Network Secretary General Manfred Seitz and Dr. Michael Prohaska, CEO “the team” GmbH, opened and moderated the event, highlighting that ports in the Danube region need to overcome “digital inertia”, build confidence and expertise in the Danube Region – from the Black Sea area to the Danube river/corridor – by debating and exploring key concepts, sharing lessons & experiences of digitalisation in practice.

The conference highlighted current EU policies, legislative initiatives and funding opportunities to support sea & inland ports digitalisation. The event also showcased how first-movers have responded to the digital challenge and driven the needed change at port organisation and port community level.

During the day, Mr Thomas Fillis, from the Commission's CEF Building Blocks team, presented the Building Blocks and outlined now Danube ports stand to gain by reusing them. The CEF Building Blocks (Context Broker, eArchiving, eDelivery, eID, eInvoicing, eSignature, Big Data Test Infrastructure and eTranslation) are set of generic and reusable Digital Service Infrastructures (DSI), facilitating the delivery of digital public services across borders and sectors.

Mr. Rui Barros, Chief executive officer MITMYNID and manager of the e-Freight Implementation Action (e-Impact) project, took this even further. Mr Barros highlighted how the reuse of CEF eDelivery reduced the cost of exchanging information between different actors and transport modes along the chain, leading to a more efficient, less polluting freight transport.

Rui Barros, MITMYNID & Thomas Fillis, DIGIT

Download the presentation or visit CEF Digital to see how the CEF Building Blocks can support digital transformation in your organisation.

How to apply eArchiving to the Spanish e-government and electronic archive model

©Pixabay

On 4 April 2019, experts from the European Commission and national and regional archives from Spain, Norway and Sweden presented the value of sustainable, authentic, cost-efficient, manageable and interoperable electronic archiving (eArchiving) in Madrid, Spain.

The event welcomed participants from universities, archives and public administration, all eager to understand how to further develop the Spanish e-government and electronic archive model.

The event also included detailed presentations on the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eArchiving Building Block, as well as the other Building Blocks supported by the Commission.

Severiano Hernández, Javier Hernández, Gerardo Bustos, and Juan Cantador  

Moderator: Carlota Bustelo. E-ARK4ALL Project

A growing number of institutions is already tackling the issue of digital legacy – how to make sure that crucial digital information gathered into ancient systems remains available through modern technologies, hardware and software components. The most usual solution is data migration - old data is exported from the initial system, reformatted if needed, and imported into the new platform. While manageable on a smaller scale, the growing number of information systems and the amount of data makes migration increasingly complex and costly. In the worst case, data migration can also lead to the loss of portions of the data or its context, seriously affecting the delivery of services for a business, loss of accountability or incorrect decisions. 

eArchiving aims to lower the cost of long-term availability by offering: 

• Open and platform independent specifications for creating time resistant packages of crucial data and metadata; 
• Open-source software components to demonstrate how data can be exported, preserved and reused according to the specifications; 
• Standardised guidance and training on issues around long-term data management and digital archiving;
• A central community for digital archiving discussions.

The CEF eArchiving Building Block provides the core specifications, software, training and knowledge to help data creators, software developers and digital archives tackle the challenge of short, medium and long-term data management and reuse in a sustainable, authentic, cost-efficient, manageable and interoperable way.

Interested in enjoying the benefits of eArchiving in your organisation?

Visit CEF Digital

AS4 Message Exchange Protocol – Helping You Secure Data Exchange Regardless of Sector

©Pixabay

The secure exchange of data across borders is a prerequisite, for not only the Digital Single Market, but also any trans-European initiative, such as the development and coordinated operation of pan-European gas transmission.

The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Gas (ENTSOG) is a non-profit association responsible for a number of regulatory tasks on behalf of Europe's gas transmission system operators and adopted AS4.

AS4 condenses in a single specification a series of well-known web-services specifications, such as WS-Security and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) with Attachments. AS4 is typically used for the secure and reliable exchange of documents, attachments to these documents and data in general, and can be used in Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Administration (B2A) and Administration-to-administration (A2A) exchange contexts.

Today, the European Commission and Member States promote AS4 through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) eDelivery Building Block. CEF eDelivery helps public administrations to exchange electronic data and documents with other public administrations, businesses and citizens, in an interoperable, secure, reliable and trusted way. Organisations must install an Access Point, or use a Service Provider, to exchange information with the AS4 messaging protocol.

CEF eDelivery offers a service package that helps you comply with European standards and technical specifications. It includes software, services, documentation and tools helping you to test, deploy and operate the building block. CEF eDelivery Conformance Testing service is to verify that an implementation of the CEF eDelivery AS4 Access Point and SMP specifications, a software package either commercial or Open Source, conforms to the relevant CEF eDelivery specifications.

As an early adopter of AS4, there are many similarities between ENTSOG AS4 and eDelivery AS4, meaning any AS4 implementation marketed to ENTSOG members for use with ENTSOG AS4 should successfully pass the tests in the eDelivery AS4 Common Profile. The newer separate module for the ENTSOG AS4 Usage Profile tests some additional features used in ENTSOG AS4, providing even more complete feature conformance.

Learn more about CEF eDelivery

Andalusia Smart Region uses Context Broker for intelligent irrigation system

The city of Osuna, Spain, built a smart irrigation system for remotely managing parks and gardens, and for optimising the use of one of nature's most precious resources, water.

@Photo by FIWARE Zone

Eight parks around Osuna were installed with IoT devices for intelligent irrigation, cutting water consumption by up to 45%. 

Quick facts

• Location: Osuna, Spain
• Organisation: The Parks and Gardens Service of Osuna City Council 
• Project: 'Andalusia Smart Region' under 'FIWARE Zone' initiative
• Challenge: Build smart applications for the better management of cities
• Solution: Smart irrigation system for parks and gardens enabled by a platform powered by FIWARE Context Broker
• Building Block: Context Broker
• EU funded: No
  
  

The challenge of managing precious resources

Osuna is a municipality in southern Spain, in the province of Seville, and has about 17,000 inhabitants. It is located 87.4 kilometres from the capital. Its climate is characterised by cold, frosty winters and very hot summers, with temperatures reaching as high as 40 °C. The Parks and Gardens Service of Osuna City Council is responsible for the conservation and maintenance of green areas, whether they are landscaped areas or urban parks in the city. Water is the city's most precious resource and its intelligent management is one of the main challenges faced every day. Their objective, therefore, is to improve the efficiency of municipal water services by reducing and adapting the use of water to weather conditions and the needs of each garden.

To establish smart irrigation, eight parks were selected for a pilot under the Andalusia Smart Region project: San Arcadio, El Maestrito, Rector Miguel Florencio Lora, Plaza de las Flores, Parque de las Autonomías, 8 March, Vice Rector Juan José Iglesias and Mohedana.

Integrating IoT with Context Broker

The smart irrigation management system consisted of various technologies to manage the maintenance of the eight gardens and parks in a centralised manner. The solution is explained below - tech talk alert!

The Internet of Things (IoT) devices needed to measure conditions such as rain, wind, humidity and temperature are called IoT sensors (1). The IoT devices that are able to take action, such as solenoid valves capable of turning water on and off, are called actuators (2). 

Several remote units or secondary nodes (3) were installed on light posts to help forward measures from sensors to the signal hub or main node (4), which further transmits them to the irrigation server (5). In the other direction, remote units are also able to forward commands from technical operators to actuators as they come through the irrigation server via the main node. The remote units are connected over a low-power radio frequency (ZigBee) meshed wireless network.

The concentrator (6) is connected to an alternating current source and transmits the information to the Thinking City platform (7) via a 2G/3G connection, although it could take advantage of any existing IP connection (WIFI, ADSL, etc.). The information sent to the Thinking City platform first goes through the IoT Agent (8), which uses the Ultralight (UL) 2.0 protocol to translate and send the parameters to Context Broker (9) in standard NGSI format. Context Broker can then finally send the readily-standardised information to be displayed in the city management dashboard, called Urbo (10). 

Technical operators at the Osuna Parks and Gardens Service manage and control the irrigation system through a technical operators' software (11), while the city's municipal managers use Urbo to make informed decisions. Any other future smart services can also be integrated into the same platform using Context Broker.

Results and benefits

The main benefit of using Context Broker is that the information coming in from the different IoT devices can be standardised and centralised. This way it is possible to analyse all information collectively through a control panel that facilitates the management, not only of irrigation, but of all smart services to be deployed in the city in the future, too. Context Broker is vendor neutral, and can incorporate new technologies in other locations without having to modify the management platform.

The smart irrigation solution in Osuna has significantly improved irrigation programs and enabled cutting down the use of water by up to 45 %. It has, therefore, proven to be an intelligent irrigation control system that allows the municipality to conduct sustainable park and garden management thanks to real-time information and remote irrigation controls. This enables the use of water resources to be optimised in an efficient, automated and centralised way. In addition, the solution can detect abnormal water consumption and automatically generate alerts for possible leaks or breaks in the network.

The investments made in software, development and hardware equipment will be returned by saving water and reducing manual labour. Furthermore, the municipality will enjoy the following benefits:

• To be able to centralise and monitor information in a single management platform.
• Access irrigation information from any computer, tablet or smartphone.
• To have a complete vision in real time of what is happening in the irrigation systems.
• To be able to immediately detect possible leaks and incidents in the network.
• Minimise response times in case of incident.
• Remote programming irrigation sequences for public gardens and green areas.
• Efficient planning of the facilities’ maintenance and operation.
• The ability to improve preventive maintenance and reduce maintenance costs.
• Increase the efficiency of irrigation systems.
• To guarantee the scalability of the intelligent irrigation platform.
• Have the ability to replace and/or expand the system with other technologies and suppliers without the need to modify the platform.
  
  

More smart services in the same platform

Andalusia Smart Region has done similar IoT-based pilots in Dos Hermanas for waste management and Lucena for street lighting and citizenship participation. In the future, they are looking to integrate more smart services into the Thinking City Platform to improve the way that Andalusian cities are managed.

How can you get started?

The Context Broker was established in 2018 to help organisations share data in real time at the right time. The documentation and support services are described on our website and available to all. We would be happy to help you get started, visit us at Context Broker to learn more.

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eTranslation and eDelivery used to build new-age machine translation router

Pan-European consortium builds a dynamic router, able to smoothly switch between domain-specific translation engines, to produce the highest possible quality machine translations.

@Photo by Pangeanic

Manuel Herranz, CEO of Pangeanic, at a post-project event in Madrid, Spain, on 12 March 2019, after successful completion of iADAATPA.

Quick facts

• Countries: Spain, Latvia, Lithuania, Ireland
• Organisation: iADAATPA consortium (now called MT-Hub)
• Project: iADAATPA
• Challenge: How to provide high-quality machine translations when a single document can include content from different subject areas and domains?
• Solution: Development of a translation engine router with language and domain detection mechanisms to dynamically switch between machine translation engines whenever a new domain is found
• Building Blocks: eTranslation, eDelivery
  
  

Challenge

Cross-border communication is always a challenge. Most European countries have machine translation (MT) systems in place, but many of them are not up to par. For example, Spain has an old system that translated the name of the Ministry Dolores del Campo into “it is pain of field”. The mistake went unnoticed and was published in November 2018 in a press release by the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, causing global amusement¹. It was high time to replace old systems with 21^st century technology.

To improve MT quality, Pangeanic had the novel idea of building a scalable and secure platform for the provision of multi-vendor automated translation services. The resulting platform, called iADAATPA, is a translation engine router with language and domain detection mechanisms. In other words, it detects the language and domain of a given document and routes it to the translation engine best suited to translate content. This frees public administrations of vendor lock-in, allowing them to contract multiple vendors for MT services.

The platform is even capable of switching between MT engines within a document and for different parts of the document, as soon as it detects a change in language or domain. To develop iADAATPA, a consortium was founded with Commission funding. The project started in autumn 2017 and ran for 1.5 years.

Solution

The consortium got to work and chose standards and technologies promoted through the European Commission's Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme, because they have been proven in practice as part of Europe's interoperable digital ecosystem and are hence low in risk. In more detail, the iADAATPA uses CEF's building blocks eTranslation and eDelivery. Building blocks are the European Commission's freely available standards-based digital solutions to help European public and private sector organisations develop digital services faster and more efficiently. eTranslation provides translation engines in seven EU domains and a web service to facilitate cross-border communication in all official EU languages, Icelandic and Norwegian. eDelivery provides the technical means to exchange digital data and documents securely and reliably. 

An integration was made from iADAATPA to eTranslation, which provided valuable language resources and MT engines in seven EU domains. eDelivery (AS4 Domibus) was used to ensure the secure and reliable exchange of the documents to be translated. To further complement the capabilities of eTranslation, consortium members made additional integrations to their own MT engines to cover domains not provided by eTranslation.

iADAATPA makes use of neural networks algorithms based on artificial intelligence, instead of the traditional statistical MT methods based word sequence patterns, for example. Consortium partners and the European Commission agreed to go for the neural-networks based approach early on in the project. The platform was implemented and tested in the following use cases:

• • Generalitat Valenciana, Spain - The Open Data portal of the regional government's transparency department
  • SEGITTUR Spain - Digital services provided by the agency for innovation and tourism technology based in Madrid
  • Lithuanian Parliament - Translation of parliamentary proceedings in Lithuanian Parliament
  • Dublin City College website
  • Deutsche Welle

Results and benefits

The iADAATPA platform was proven ready for consumer use based on an assessment of its language and domain detection abilities. iADAATPA will change the MT landscape by offering a vendor and technology neutral platform that will increase MT efficiency and competition and eventually, lead to more competitive translation prices on the market. By enhancing access to different MT providers, it will also help realise the Digital Single Market in Europe.

The translation quality of each individual MT engine was also tested in their respective domains with positive results. For example, the project's final report stated that Pangeanic's MT system, specialised in tourism and PA OpenData, was "ranked as ‘best’ more than 67 % of the times, against 7.32 % of the times for the baseline", with the baseline being another leading MT engine in the market. This shows that highly specialised translation engines are a must for achieving top-quality translations, and iADAATPA is needed for smoothly switching between domains and engines. Based on the positive outcome of the project, the Spanish Administration has decided to adopt iADAATPA, now called MT-hub platform, as a core component of their national translation infrastructure.

Results also surpassed all expectations of the Lithuanian Parliament. Lithuania had had bad experiences with MT technologies before, as their language is hard to translate with traditional statistical translation methods. With iADAATPA, productivity and MT quality significantly increased. The consortium reported productivity increases of around 40 % in achieving final human quality translations.

All members of the consortium had complementary skills and assets, which made collaboration very fruitful. Professor Andy Way from the Dublin City University rejoiced that "the iADAATPA consortium partners proved such a high level of professionalism that I'd love to work with all of them again. This is the proof of a well-run consortium."

Next steps

The consortium is now focusing on an extension of the project to get the word out to public administrations on this new service, and to help public administrations adopt a framework to manage MT services at different levels.

Sources:

1. Fiorentino, Michael-Ross. 'Pain of the field': the embarrassing automatic translation of the Spanish Ministry of Industry. Euronews, 19 Nov. 2018, https://www.euronews.com/2018/11/19/pain-of-the-field-the-embarrassing-automatic-translation-of-the-spanish-ministry-of-indus. Accessed 8 Mar. 2019.