Partnership builds on drive towards open standards in cities and regions
By using open standards and APIs, Fiware Foundation and Open & Agile Smart Cities strive to enable companies and cities to share and reuse digital, data-driven solutions in a “seamless fashion”.
Fiware and OASC want to support cities in their decision-making over data-sharing
Fiware Foundation and Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) have announced a new formal partnership to help drive open standards and innovation in cities and regions.
Under the terms of the new collaborative agreement, Fiware will support cities in their decision-making process to implement OASC’s minimal interoperability mechanisms (Mims), enabling them to exchange solutions and share open data more easily.
Equally, OASC will use its global reach to advise cities and communities about the importance of open standards and digital tools – such as the one provided by Fiware – for companies and public administrations to be able to build a sustainable future.
In a separate announcement, Fiware Foundation is also progressing its work with the ICT Innovation Network of Slovenia to make Slovenia a green reference country within Europe.
Share and reuse data
By using open standards and APIs, both organisations strive to enable companies and cities to share and reuse digital, data-driven solutions in a “seamless fashion”, hence, reducing the cost of innovation, and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Fiware is a non-profit organisation that drives the definition and encourages the adoption of open standards based on open source technologies, reference architectures and some 800 smart data models.
OASC is a global network of more than 160 cities – spread across 30 countries – committed to ensuring cities and communities have a clear voice toward technology providers and regulators.
Based on open standards and technical specifications, including Fiware NGSI-LD and Mim2 smart data models, Mims provide the technical foundation for the procurement and deployment of urban data platforms and end-to-end solutions in cities and communities worldwide.
“Given our combined skills from a demand and supply side, respectively, we are ideally positioned to fully understand what cities need in order to implement cost-effective, sustainable, inclusive, smart, and interoperable solutions”
Vendor-neutral and technology-agnostic, OASC reports its Mims can be integrated with existing systems and have already been adopted by the OASC Council of Cities, which represents the entire OASC network.
“Given our combined skills from a demand and supply side, respectively, we are ideally positioned to fully understand what cities need in order to implement cost-effective, sustainable, inclusive, smart, and interoperable solutions”, said Ulrich Ahle, CEO of Fiware Foundation.
“Building upon the Digital Europe Programme – that aims to bridge the digital technology gap for businesses, citizens and public administrations – we will seek ways in which technologies can meet cities’ vision of open, fair, inclusive and sustainable local economic development.”
In addition, both organisations are set to create value and synergies across several other areas. As part of the collaboration, they have agreed to the following:
- Fiware to become a strategic partner of OASC and join OASC’s Technology Council
- OASC to become a Fiware associate member and an attending member of its foundation board of directors
- the organisations will join each other’s respective mission support/technical steering committees and actively contribute to each other’s relevant working groups
- they will collaborate on digital twin and artificial intelligence (AI) standardisation requirements, and the open source implementation of jointly identified standards requirements
- both will foster adoption among academia, researchers, and companies (among others) of open standards for open source technology, used as reference implementation of such standards
- the results of their collaboration will be disseminated through regular events and seminars, underscoring their commitment to driving wide-scale adoption of, in particular, data spaces, open technologies, digital twins, and AI.
With regards to the latter, Fiware and OASC will be presenting such outcomes in their upcoming Summits, respectively, the Fiware Global Summit (19-20 January 2022, Gran Canaria, Spain) and OASC CityxCity Festival (12-13 January 2022, Brussels, Belgium, and online).
Slovenia collaboroation
Fiware Foundation’s engagement with the Solvenian ICT Innovation Network started earlier this year when the organisation joined the foundation as an associate member, and its collaboration has grown considerably since then. Ulrich Ahle and Andreja Lampe, head of the ICT Innovation Network, have driven the white paper Gaia-X and European Smart Cities and Communities, published in October.
Issued by the Gaia-X European Association for Data and Cloud AISBL and the Data Spaces and Business Committee, the publication aims to define what are the use cases, and requirements from smart cities in relation to the Gaia-X architecture. Several key smart city actors from Vienna – a Fiware user city, including Brigitte Lutz, a member of Fiware Foundation’s board of directors – have also contributed to the publication.
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