May 6, 2021

Smart Applications for Data Spaces and Digital Twins

The use of data has become essential for decision-making and the automation of processes across both the public and the private sectors. Data sharing is becoming increasingly important and offers numerous benefits, helping SMEs all over Europe to save valuable time and money as well as engaging in development of innovative services with other players.
Gernot Boege

FIWARE increases the efforts to let the notions of data spaces and digital twins gain traction. A new working group on data spaces has been launched and a paper “FIWARE for Data Spaces” has just been published. Furthermore, the use case “Digital Twin of Mobility Stations” has been recently accepted to the upcoming Mobility Data Space, based on GAIA-X in Germany, and FIWARE is a contributing partner in the data space-related projects i4trust and KI Marktplatz.

FIWARE drives the definition and encourages the adoption of open standards — implemented using open-source technologies and smart data models — that ease the development of smart solutions across multiple domains.

FIWARE IDS/EIDS connector technology

The Context Broker, as an integral part of the FIWARE EIDS CIM REST Connector, supports effective data exchange among parties by using the standard NGSI-LD API. With our contribution to the Boost4.0 project, we break down ‘data silos’ through the sharing, re-using, and trading of interoperable data assets, and we boost the creation of innovative services in different sectors.

The development of the FIWARE EIDS CIM REST Connector has been guided by several design goals. SMEs, developers, and interested parties shall be empowered to start quickly and easily into the world of IDS, with minimal upfront efforts but the full potential to scale up and adapt quickly. The technology stack (based on Kubernetes, combined with Istio service mesh) has been chosen to be open, well-adapted, and cloud-ready. Service providers and diverse business models shall be supported with multi-cluster, multi-connector, multi-tenant, and multi-API options available from the very beginning.

We plan to incorporate the FIWARE IDS/EIDS connector as an incubated FIWARE Generic Enabler to explore its adoption by the wider FIWARE Community and Ecosystem. As such, it would become a part of the security chapter of the FIWARE Catalogue of open-source software components. So it could be optionally included as a component in the various domain-specific reference architectures to support IDS/EIDS compliant data exchange between different organizations. That will help to strengthen the position of smart platforms/solutions “powered by FIWARE” in the context of coming IDSA and GAIA-X scenarios. SMEs will work more efficiently and cost-effectively to build innovative services around data value chains. Before, the necessary IDS certification process has to be passed when the certification facilities are made available to the public.

A great opportunity to learn more about FIWARE’s connector is the open-source session “Open Source Helps Data Spaces Sprout Everywhere” at our Summit on June 22 & 23! Agenda and registratrion: internationaldataspaces.org/idsa-summit-2021

From June 8-10, FIWARE will host the Smart Fest. Learn more about FIWARE’s biggest event of the year here: https://www.fiware.org/fiware-smart-fest/

Author: Gernot Boege
Gernot Boege is a Solution Architect at the FIWARE Foundation. To access more pre-release information, please contact gernot.boege@fiware.org

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