The FI-NEXT project aims at supporting and evolving the FIWARE Community and ecosystem. In this context the overall objectives of FI-NEXT are:
1. From an EU Open Source project to a global Open Source community
2. Ensure FIWARE meets the highest quality standards and best technical support
3. Position FIWARE as de-facto standard for development of Smart Applications
4. Ensure support and sustainability of the FIWARE Lab environment
From an EU Open Source project to a global Open Source community
It is worth noting that large successful Open Source communities are underpinned by an organization whose sole raison d’etre is to foster the community: examples include Openstack, Apache, Linux, etc. Although there have been examples in which individual companies support an ecosystem, generally tensions arise between the companies and the individuals contributing their efforts at some point; with an independent non-profit organization supporting the ecosystem with no agenda other than growing the ecosystem, as it is the FIWARE Foundation, such conflicts shall not occur.
In summary, the FIWARE Community is there, now it needs to be instantiated, i.e. to staff it properly, support it with infrastructures, and engage the community.
Ensure FIWARE meets the highest quality standards and best technical support
The FIWARE ecosystem relies on a large set of freely available, sophisticated open source components.
What if FIWARE will be the first open source community to introduce an approach to make quality of its software components visible for developers and business deciders?
The aim of FI-NEXT is to create a set of procedures and supporting tools so that quality of the FIWARE software components is visible to all.
Position FIWARE as de-facto standard for development of Smart Applications
Implementation of Smart Digital Application and Services relies heavily on the management of Context Information. Indeed, nothing can be “smart” (i.e. exhibit an intelligent behavior) without first being “context-aware” (i.e. capable to capture and handle the information describing what is happening around). By context information we mean all information about entities that are relevant. Implicit in the intelligent behavior of Smart Applications and Services is the advanced processing and analysis of available context information.
Although context information has been worked on since the Web 2.0 phenomena, the emergence of the Internet of Things had the capacity to enormously enrich context due to much greater data availability. This, combined with the ability of new cloud-based technologies enabling real-time processing and big data analysis, paves the way for a new breed of innovative Smart Digital Applications and Services.
In order to realise this vision a common standard for Context Information Management is needed. Such a standard would provide the means by which individuals, products and processes will become more connected, through the generation and exchange of context information about who is (and was) doing what and where, fueling processing and analytics. Portability of applications and services across platforms supporting this basic context information management standard would be feasible, thus avoiding lock in any platform vendor. On the other hand, the existence of a context information management standard would be key to enable an Economy of Data that would be based on interoperability among players in multi-sided markets where context information produced by applications in one sector (e.g. information about traffic provided by the smart city platform in a city) can become valuable for the identification of new services around products by other providers (e.g. product delivery in the retail sector), altogether creating a spectrum of services with the potential to address the dovetailing requirements of both producers and users of information.
The aim in FI-NEXT is to achieve FIWARE NGSI as a recognised standard.
Ensure support and sustainability of the FIWARE Lab environment
FIWARE Lab is a non-commercial sandbox where innovation and experimentation based on FIWARE technologies can take place. Web entrepreneurs, developers and domain stakeholders can experiment with FIWARE technologies to implement their ideas, having also the possibility to exploit Open Data published by cities and other organizations (currently more than 2.600 open data sets are published through the data portal of FIWARE Lab).
FIWARE Lab is deployed over a geographically distributed network of federated FIWARE Lab nodes. Each FIWARE Lab node, operated under the responsibility of a specific organization, maps to one (or a network of) data centres .In this context the aim of FI-NEXT is keep the open and free of charge nature of FIWARE Lab while identifying and putting in place a business model capable of ensuring its sustainability in an independent way.
