From October 23 to 24, 2019, the FIWARE Global Summit was held in Berlin, Germany, attended by more than a thousand experts in the field of internet of things, smart solutions, blockchain, smart cities and industry as well as agrifood.
Under the slogan "Scale up for a Real Smart Future", countless workshops, conferences, discussions as well as demonstrations of intelligent digital solutions based on the open FIWARE platform were offered. The 7th edition of the FIWARE Global Summit made Berlin the center of solutions for a smart digital future.
What is FIWARE?
FIWARE is an ecosystem of innovation and open entrepreneurship that is based on future internet technologies. This ecosystem is rapidly becoming a solid base platform for the development of intelligent services that began in Europe and is expanding internationally. But the growing popularity of this ecosystem is also due to the fact that it is truly within everyone's reach and that it is royalty-free, that is, no license is required to use it.
An Open Platform for a Smart Digital Future
The FIWARE platform was developed by the European program for the development of Internet of the Future (FI-PPP) whose main objective was to build a sustainable ecosystem around open standards where opportunities can be captured by application and platform providers. FIWARE provides a set of components offered "as a service" that simplify the development of intelligent solutions in different sectors of activity.
Smart solutions have as main feature the data collection of the environment in which it operates (they are context sensitive), from different sources such as end users, sensor networks, mobile applications and all kinds of information systems such as customer relationship management and social networks. This context information is analyzed in a way that allows automatic decision-making, generating the "appropriate" actions to the environment in which the solution is developed.
The Heart of FIWARE: the Context Broker
To collect and manage context information, FIWARE has a central component called Context Broker, through which it interacts with other platforms or applications using the restful FIWARE NGSI API. This API is open and standard, so it offers developers the ability to port their applications through different platforms also developed with FIWARE and a stable framework for future developments. On the other hand, it is possible to add additional functionalities through the use of other FIWARE components or third-party components, for which the integration with the Context Broker is resolved. This integration is simplified since all components are based on the standard FIWARE NGSI interface.
FIWARE Simplifies the Internet of Things
In addition to the Context Broker, FIWARE has other components that allow the Internet of Things to be simpler by establishing interfaces that facilitate the connection with physical devices, allow the transformation of large clusters of information into knowledge, allow to unleash the potential of open data in Real time, among other things.
FIWARE focuses on breaking information silos through the establishment of standards, enabling data economy and guaranteeing its sovereignty.
FIWARE Cloud
This cloud makes FIWARE components available for download and use. But this cloud also offers an experimentation environment, where users can test the technology and its applications, using the open data published by cities and other organizations that are made available to the applications.
FIWARE Expansion Programs
In addition to being an open platform, FIWARE has other initiatives that boost its use at an international level, such as a FIWARE acceleration program, which offers financing for the development of FIWARE projects in European countries, FIWARE Mundus, a FIWARE expansion program for worldwide and FIWARE iHubs a program of innovation centers around the world that contribute to the creation of FIWARE user and contributor communities at the local level.
The last FIWARE Global Summit was an event that highlighted the importance of this open platform for an intelligent digital future as well as the help it proposes so that intelligent solutions are available to everyone.