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Open Source Standards in Smart Cities and IoT

Open Source Standards in Smart Cities and IoT

The IoT and Smart Cities technology landscape is growing at lightning speed. More than 35 billion IoT devices were installed around the world by the end of 2021. That number is expected to double over the next 3 years. With this growing demand comes innovation. There were an estimated 1,200 startups developing innovative IoT technologies last year. With this proliferation of new technologies and technology vendors, the issue of compatibility and interoperability of IoT technologies is coming to the forefront. 

FIWARE was established to address this challenge. FIWARE is a global initiative to create open-source standards for data handling, storage, and analysis to ensure compatibility of new IoT technologies with legacy systems and data sources. FIWARE provides tools, APIs and frameworks that collect, store, and retrieve data in compliance with a harmonized set of standards, that minimize the need for complex data modelling and integrations which can add complexity and cost to IoT projects, and sometimes mutate the data. 

The key to success for any IoT initiative is establishing reliable context across all data sources to support analysis and decision-making. FIWARE helps ensure the integrity of the context across legacy systems and new IoT enhancements. FIWARE open-source standards help streamline IoT and Smart City implementations by:

  1. Providing a well-organized, structured, system for data storage, retrieval, and analysis.

  2. Supporting transparent policies for monitoring and benchmarking.

  3. Facilitating easy integration with legacy and future data sources and systems.

  4. Enabling cross-sector data interchanges for greater visibility and operational control.

  5. Simplifying systems integration requirements for IoT systems thereby reducing complexity and cost and increasing speed of deployments.

  6. Minimizing the need for custom data modelling and data manipulations.

  7. Allowing adoption of innovative IoT technologies while minimizing concern for backwards compatibility.

  8. Reducing client dependence on a single vendor or technology stack.

Since 2019, Trigyn has been a major supporter of FIWARE and incorporated FIWARE tools, APIs and frameworks into its Smart Cities and IoT client solutions.