On February 20, 2020, the event “FIWARE – Smart Solutions for Smart Cities” was hosted by the Austrian Digital Value (ADV) Association at the FH Technikum Wien. FIWARE is an Open Source initiative, which offers a global standard for the implementation of “smart” structures (https://www.fiware.org/). The Research Group AAL already deals with this topic and the implementation of an interoperable platform for the collection, sharing and processing of sensor data and context information was pushed in different projects.
The event offered the occasion to get up-to-date regarding current developments around FIWARE and to receive an insight into best-practice examples from the field of Smart Cities. The application of FIWARE in the framework of the Smart City Vienna was a big part of the event presentations. Digital solutions such as IoT-based applications and a city-dashboard are already a fixed part of the infrastructure of Vienna. As further use case, an approach to digitize building and maintenance infrastructure was presented. This idea is the basis of a currently ongoing interdisciplinary research project at the TU Graz. Representatives of the FIWARE Foundation presented various links to FIWARE – from technical perspective, especially for developers and from a non-technical perspective, focusing on the accompanying advantages for communities and cities. The event was closed with the implementation of a first FIWARE use case in the setting of a 60 minutes technical workshop
The participation in the event and the networking with participants showed, that the implementation of interoperable interfaces like FIWARE is currently mainly used in the field of Smart Cities and there exist only few examples for the areas of Smart Health and Smart Homes. Nevertheless, especially in the interdisciplinary field of AAL, it is of major importance to settle interoperable standard interfaces for technical solutions to ensure plug-and-play exchange between different systems and data structures. Therefore, the Research Group AAL will continue to develop and exchange the FIWARE-based middleware platform.
