Internet of Things (IoT) World Congress 2018
On 16 – 18 October 2018, the European Commission presented the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Blocks at the Internet of Things (IoT) World Congress 2018. The event gathered over 16,000 visitors from start-ups, entrepreneurs, small and large businesses and other stakeholders from all over the world.
The CEF Building Blocks participated under the auspices of the FIWARE Foundation. FIWARE is an independent Open Community committed “to build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors”. The FIWARE-developed Context Broker recently became a Building Block of the CEF programme.
The development of IoT has meant a significant disruption in the recent years, transforming the daily lives of individuals and revolutionising how companies run their businesses. Internet of Things, combined with information processing and Big Data services on the Cloud, is going to enable a new breed of innovative Smart Digital Services. However, nothing can be smart without being context-aware in the first place.
Implementation of Smart Digital Services largely rely on the management of Context Information, about the entities that are relevant to understanding what is happening around us, by different systems and solutions that are able to share relevant data in a common language:
“in order to enable the interoperability of solutions, it’s necessary to have a semantic interoperability of the data” –explains Sergio García, Technology Specialist and Smart City Solutions Leader in Industrial IoT Area, at Telefónica I+D.
The current lack of ICT platform standards to manage such information means an obstacle for the development of Smart Digital Services. Without open standards those services cannot be developed effectively due to lack of interoperability.
Simple and powerful set of APIs that are public and royalty free
Providing a simple and powerful set of APIs that are public and royalty free, FIWARE is supporting the development of Smart Applications managing context information, so the Context Broker developed by FIWARE is a vital step forward in harnessing the value of IoT. The adoption of FIWARE as a provider for a CEF Building Blocks has emphasised the intention of the community and its core members to push the adoption of standards and technologies as essential tools for the cost effective development of IoT based services and solutions. Aiming to ease that process, FIWARE currently offers both open-source technical resources –like the Context Broker – as well as common standards to follow.
The Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) supports multiple digital infrastructure projects which contribute to improvements in the daily lives of Europeans through digital inclusion, the connectivity and interoperability of European digital services, and the development of a Digital Single Market.