Smart Cities Webinar: Q&A Published

On 26 February, the CEF Digital team held a webinar on the use of the CEF Building Blocks in the context of Smart Cities. Participants engaged in enthusiastic online dialogue with presenters.
Below you can find written answers to those questions we couldn't manage to answer online. In addition, you can also listen to the Q&A recording. We've published separate recordings for the various Q&A sessions to help you find the info you need.

Watch the first Q&A session, answering questions on Joao Rodrigues Frade's part: How the CEF services can support your transformation effort (as of 20:50)
Watch the second session, answering questions on Carl Piva and Ulrich Ahle's part: Smart City case studies (as of 15:10)
Watch the last session, answering remaining questions on the entire webinar: Closing words and Q&A (as of 6:00).

Is there a list of communities, solutions or interoperability mechanisms cities/municipalities can refer to?

Yes, there are several European websites illustrating smart cities initiatives, solutions and projects such as:

Are the CEF Building Blocks available on https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/ ?

Yes, please follow this link.

Whom shall I contact if we want to discuss possible Big Data Test Infrastructure (BDTI) pilot projects?

Visit big data test infrastructure on CEF Digital and contact us on cef-building-blocks@ec.europa.eu.
Don't miss the next webinar on 19 March to experiment with BDTI and turn your government data into valuable insight.

Which CEF Building Blocks do you plan to introduce in the future?

The European Commission is extending the CEF Building Blocks catalogue to Blockchain. With this, the Commission hopes to consolidate the political and technological efforts carried out at EU level in the area of Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to further the delivery of a generic and reusable CEF Blockchain Building Block to be added to the existing ecosystem of CEF Building Blocks.
Please consult the Work Programme 2019, pp 69 - 71 for more information.

Where do I find info about funding opportunities for the CEF Building Blocks?

The Innovation & Networks Executive Agency (INEA) is responsible for CEF calls for proposals.
There is currently a call running until 14 May 2019 and includes grant funding for five of the CEF Building Blocks:

eTranslation (Automated Translation) (€ 4 million)
eID (€ 4.5 million)
eSignature (€ 0.5 million)
eDelivery (€ 1 million)
eInvoicing (€ 6.2 million)

Please consult this page for more information.

A second call will open on 4 July 2019 including one on Public Open Data.

Is the CEF funding program also open for Swiss cities ?

This is defined for each Building Block Digital Service Infrastructure (DSI) under the relevant heading in the Work Programme 2019.

Do you use technologies like https://kafka.apache.org/ for the Context Broker?

The CEF Context Broker Building Block can be integrated with Apache Kafka in order to follow the Apache line in the same way that it could be integrated with other solutions; it is however not based on Apache Kafka.
Nevertheless, the Context Broker is based in the same publish-subscribe-notify architecture like Apache Kafka.

In the Vienna Context Broker use case, are the live-cameras GDPR compliant?

Yes, since the cameras are using a functionality called "Edge Technology" that pixels the faces. This solution prevents the use of personal data and people identification.

Does the Context Broker have a use case in Switzerland?

Martel Innovate is a FIWARE Member located in Switzerland.

Who are the investors of the FIWARE Foundation, the technology provider of the Context Broker Building Block?

The FIWARE Foundation is a non-profit organization. 200 members currently contribute to FIWARE's mission. You can find all the information about their members on this page.

It seems that there is occasionally an image problem in the FIWARE platform because of the documentation and the quality of the code. Is that a general problem? Or something associated with specific technical people? Will the FIWARE Foundation address it?

Usually, the FIWARE Foundation takes care of the issues that are found in the different components and tries to resolve them inside the community.
The Context Broker Building Block is also under the technical scope of FIWARE Foundation and it can resolve any issue detected on that image without any problem.

Regarding the Context Broker, how the Next Generation Service Interfaces (NGSI) will make Silo systems share data? Does it require more work on each of these silo's systems ?

Silo systems can take the information that is generated by itself and translate to the NGSI data format in order to communicate it to the Context Broker. Additionally, Silo systems can use the IoT Agents component developed as well by the FIWARE Community to translate common protocols and data representation to NGSI data representation and HTTP/HTTPS connectivity. There are several options in terms of data model representation and connectivity.

Are the cities using the CEF Building Blocks already defined or can new cities make use of them?

Any city or municipality can start using the CEF Building Blocks which can be used independently or separately in various contexts.

Blog