CEF Context Broker at FIWARE Summit 2019
On 23-24 October 2019, the 7th FIWARE Global Summit: “Scale Up for a Real Smart Future” took place in Berlin, Germany.
On 23 October, a panel entitled “Smart City Program Leaders” was organised, in which Kenji Hiramoto, IT Chief Strategist in the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of Japan, presented the Smart Cities program in Japan. Caroline Corneau, IT Project Officer at the European Commission, presented the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) programme. The discussions between the participants and the panellists allowed a better understand of the extent to which the vision of the Japan government and of the European Commission are aligned, and the progress made in Japan and in the European Union on helping towards the transformation of cities into engines of growth by enabling the Data Economy.
On 24 October, the CEF Context Broker Building Block was presented at the summit during an interactive workshop entitled “CEF Connecting Europe Facility Workshop: Ready to digitize Smart Services for Public Administration".
The workshop aimed at identifying the benefits of the Building Blocks for public administrations in EU Member States, and the ways in which the Building Blocks can facilitate the development of smart solutions and how they can enable the creation of digital service infrastructures for digital services that work seamlessly across the frontiers of the EU Member States.
The workshop was an opportunity for the participants to ask questions, explore together the challenges and the needs of the organisations in which they are managing, and find out the ways in which the Context Broker Building Block can be useful for their organisation, public or private. A number of CEF Success Stories look at how the Context Broker has helped build world-class services using context data.
In late 2018, the Context Broker, the core of the FIWARE platform, was approved by the European Commission as a CEF Building Block and has since been reused by the first early adopters like cities and regions.
The CEF Context Broker enables organisations to manage and share data in real-time describing “what is currently happening” within their organisations, in the real world they manage or where they run their daily business processes. Thus, for example, Smart Cities can share information about what is happening in streets (e.g. traffic status, quality of air data, available parking slots, location). Similarly, a packet delivery service company may share data about orders (e.g. current location and expected delivery time).
Management of context information within an organisation is key since it allows assembling together information linked to different systems within the organisation, which are otherwise performing as separate information silos. This enables implementation of systems supporting overall governance functions and the exploitation of data with a more holistic perspective.