Orange, Telefonica, Engineering and Atos have joined forces to create the Fiware open source community to support the evolution of standards for smart cities and their spread worldwide. The partners expect the Fiware Open Source Community to be fully operational in the middle of the year. “Fiware does not just support a more efficient management of municipal services. It brings open standards enabling to transform cities into engines of growth,” explained Marieta Rivero, Chief Deputy Commercial Officer at Telefonica. “Using Fiware, smart cities can deliver the platform, combining Open Data and the APIs based on which new innovative applications can be created,” she added. Thanks to the open nature of Fiware specifications, multiple providers may emerge so that cities and application providers can avoid getting locked in.
Fiware standard APIs, combined with standard data models developed together with cities and application developers, will ensure portability and interoperability of smart city applications. This will allow to develop smart city applications for different cities at the same time, thus creating a market large enough to attract startups and small enterprises who will create new innovative services for citizens and businesses in urban areas. “There is an incredible opportunity for European cities to take advantage of open solutions and a wide community of developers, to quickly bring digital services and innovations to their citizens,” commented Patrice Slupowski, Orange vice-president of digital innovation.
Fiware is an open source platform integrating a number of components making it easier to develop smart applications. It was created through a public-private partnership between more than 40 organisations and the European Commission.
