Smart cities and Tech Evolution – XXVI Service Infrastructure – FIWare

Roberto Saracco September 20, 2016 Blog 172 Views

An example of a SOA is FIWare.

FIWARE is the main result of the EU Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) and of the EU commitment to help entrepreneurs thrive in Europe via the Startup Europe initiative, an investment of several hundred million euros over the last five years. FIWARE provides enhanced OpenStack-based cloud hosting capabilities and a rich library of components. These components, called the “Generic Enablers”, provide open standard APIs that make it easier to connect to Internet of Things devices, process data and media in real-time at large scale, perform Big Data analysis or incorporate advanced features to interact with the user, build applications easy to replicate in various relevant sectors. They allow developers to set the foundations of the architecture associated to their application. In FIWARE, Generic Enabler (GE) API specifications are public and royalty-free, supported by open source reference implementations. Thanks to that, alternative FIWARE providers can emerge faster in the market. 
 FIWare is deploying all around Europe, and it is also getting ready to do so around the world, a set of FiWare Lab Nodes also including a Security Operations Centre (SOC) in order to address security issues on an organizational and technical level.

Service Developers can access the FIWARE catalogue to deploy and use the City Enabler in a city. It is compliant and connected to other catalogues, namely the 

  • ORION GEi, and
  • IDAS GEi

These will let the City Enabler support micro proxies to collect the data from IoT infrastructures installed in cities. 

The FIWare Service Infrastructure facilitates the access to sensors (IoT) acting as a Context Broker managing a variety of protocols at the physical level letting the service operate at an abstract level. Hence a service can interact with a sensor/actuator by acting on its virtual representation in FIWare that will take care of the “implementation” of that interaction at physical level. This is particulalry useful given the variety of IoT in a city and their evoelution over time that would require, in absence of a virtualisation, a continuous update of the service.

These properties facilitate urban service providers and the Industry to rapidly develop micro proxies that are able to get data from IoT infrastructures and put them in the City Data workspace.

Clearly the City should move on a path to create a virtual representation of itself, as I will discuss when dealing with the Data Fabric.

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

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