The AURORAL Middleware is the core technical solution of AURORAL. It enables seamless and secure data sharing across public and private networks. Distributed ledger technology enhances on authenticity in data sharing and enables smart contracts. The defined ontologies have been created, based on best practices from FIWARE, NGSI-LD or Schema.org and are thus easily extendable and applicable. The Middleware further introduced the possibility for federated semantic discovery, fine grained access control via ODRL privacy policies, firewall through the whole punching to connect from private networks bundled with automatic peer discover. Semantic discovery is not only used to find peers and data sharing opportunities, but also to fuel many of AURORAL’s accompanying services with meta data, like the CKAN data catalogue or the AURORAL Services Store.
28 innovations were identified during AURORAL’s implementation. They range from more general applications, like LLM based services for sentiment and user feedback analysis, to domain specific solutions, like the energy advisory service to improve building’s performance ratings including the use of virtual reality, or livestock precision farming using AI analysis of sensor collars and IoT powered production monitoring. All solutions showcase the benefits of standardised interoperability and data sharing, e.g. SafeSEARCH bundles weather data, maps, public incident information, with IoT and live data from drones, to manage search and rescue missions guiding several teams and organisations; or in Hålogaland tourism pilot, were public transport schedules, mystery tours, donation system, 360° interactive panoramas, map data, point of interests and local information are all bundled within the oHA horizontal service to present a seamless digital experience to tourists. AURORAL AI and dash boarding services are used to analyse the collected IoT data of visitor counters, trash bin sensors, user feedback and application log data to give insights into tourist behavior, better plan new experiences, optimise maintenance and to improve touristic offerings.
SmarTomorrow in itself presents a huge innovation, offering many benefits to digital doers and rural regions. Besides helping innovators to bring their vision to live and sustain them, many problems in the current digital landscape were identified, described and new alternative more financially, economically and socially sustainable solutions were developed. The AURORAL business models are also special, since they are based on a newly developed business model canvas template which also takes socio-economic aspects into account.
