FI-WARE, technical components and reusing projects

Earlier this decade, the European Commission initiated a collaboration with large European technology companies to develop a common infrastructure that would allow Europe to be at the forefront of technology. The goal: establishing itself as world leader ahead of the United States and its technological giants: Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon, among others. This bet is called FIWARE, a software platform that aims to be an open and sustainable ecosystem public and free from royalties, to facilitate the development of new applications transversely to any industry standard.

From the technical point of view, FIWARE architecture is mainly based on two types of components:

• Generic Enablers (GE), or general purpose features, offered through public APIs based on open source technologies. The aim of these "facilitators" IS to simplify the access to advanced and low level features both for businesses and developers: from big data technologies, through the Internet of Things to management context.
• Domain-Specific Enablers (DSE), or domain-specific functionality. These components have been developed through European projects with a specific application and, therefore, are aimed at offering niche solutions. Specifically DESs currently exists for manufacturing, health, and multimedia content, energy and agrifood.

In addition to this initiative, the Commission through the FIWARE Accelerate program finances business projects for the development of applications based on fiware through sixteen "accelerators". The approximate allocation of these entities amounted to 100 million euros and aims to select, finance and advise projects aiming to implement business ideas in certain specific themes; sucking each at an average funding between 50,000 and 150,000 euros.

Nationally, there are several projects that have chosen FIWARE technology to build solutions such as CANARD company that offers fast and accurate calibration of navigational aids at airports. The purpose of this product is to fully automate the processes of flight inspection (evaluation of flight support systems) without human intervention. CANARD uses augmented reality technology, drones and fiware platform for building your product.

In a totally different Divertour sector it operates, a platform designed to bring the cultural heritage in a fun and playful to the public. Thus, centers and tour guides through this service based on Fireware can create games for mobile devices, using the geolocation of the user, augmented reality and social interactions to explore museums, galleries and even cities in new ways and attractive.

Industry mobile application development is one of the business areas that can benefit most from this open technology, an example of the potential opportunities is the app Wazypark, which can locate the free parking spaces and share these locations with other users network. In fact, the European Commission, aware of the potential of fiware for creating commercial applications, launched the FI-Lab initiative, a laboratory of innovation available in the cloud that allows European developers experiment with all the possibilities offered in 2014 this technology.

Thanks to fiware has created an innovative ecosystem around a platform able to exploit open data that enables entrepreneurs to develop not only commercial applications, but solutions for more efficient management of city services to become one more incentive for the development of Smart Cities in Europe