In a two-part blog series, Angelo Marguglio from Engineering R&D Lab provides an overview on how IDSA, Fiware, and the Big Data Value Association are the cornerstone of a broader roadmap for making open-source technologies a reality for many SMEs and large enterprises.
Fiware Smart Industry Mission Support Committee
Fiware is a curated framework of open-source platform components that can be assembled with other third-party platform components to accelerate the development of smart solutions. Independence in decision making, openness, transparency, and meritocracy are the cornerstones and founding principles of the Fiware Community. It is committed to materializing the Fiware mission, that is: “to build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors”.
Currently, I am co-chairing the Smart Industry Mission Support Committee (MSC) and strongly support the establishment of the future roadmap of the Fiware Industrial Community. The liaison between IDSA and FIWARE is designed to expand and actualize Europe’s focus on the secure and sovereign exchange of data between companies and organizations in a way that is agnostic regarding technologies, platforms, and vendors.
BDVA Smart Manufacturing Industry sub-group
The Big Data Value Association (BDVA) is an industry-driven international not-for-profit organization. The mission of the BDVA is “to develop the Innovation Ecosystem that will enable the data-driven digital transformation in Europe delivering maximum economic and societal benefit, and, achieving and sustaining Europe’s leadership on Big Data Value creation and Artificial Intelligence”. BDVA offers expertise and people who bring a functional point of view to the table, complementing IDSA’s international approach and expertise in support of data sharing in a data economy. The liaison relationship has the potential to help build an onboarding community, enabling users to implement IDS components in an ecosystem of trust, and integrate BD/AI applications and platforms into the ecosystem to deliver functionality to potential customers.
Engineering is actively co-leading the SMI sub-group, where most of the activities are executed internally by the BDVA group and promoted externally by publishing papers and contributing to various events. The work of the group aims at aligning the view (data-driven) coming from other sources such as IDS and EFFRA, just to name a few.
The 2018 edition of the paper collected 56 technical challenges related to the adoption and exploitation of Big Data (and related aspects) in the Smart Manufacturing domain. The 2020 edition, taking into account the European Strategy for Data recently published by the European Commission, consolidates the initial challenges elaborating 14 groups distributed in the main manufacturing scenarios (Smart Factory, Smart Product, Smart Supply Chain).
The plan for the next steps is to focus on the challenges and adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing. This will be developed in collaboration with the AI, Data, and Robotics communities.
Conclusions
Engineering and IDSA firmly believe in EU-led initiatives shaping and supporting the EU’s digital future. This is recognized in our close involvement in some of the initiatives where we often cover relevant directing and chairing roles and are making big investments in terms of time and resources.
Given our leading role in the market and in many innovation initiatives, we will foster collaboration among them, giving the possibility to cross-fertilize their roadmaps and future actions but not changing their focus, but paving the way to further complementary actions, to build a stronger European industry based on open standards and open-source solutions, taking into consideration elements such as openness, security, sharing, and reuse.
This commitment is oriented towards the creation of a Data Space Economy, enabling new business opportunities in all sectors: from industrial to medical diagnostics, finance, public administration, energy, mobility, agriculture, and many others.
