Towards Open Collaboration: FIWARE and IOTA join forces for a Smart Digital Future

Mathew Yarger ·

Recently, we announced that we at the IOTA Foundation are making new strides Toward Open Collaboration. As a part of this effort, we are relinquishing the development silo that we have built to enable cohesive contributions into external collaborative organizations. This process started with the first landmark of the IOTA Foundation joining as a member of the Linux Foundation under their LF Edge project. The steps we’re making with the Linux Foundation were the first in breaking new ground for us, but by far not the last.  

To reiterate some of the core principles of the IOTA protocol, with one addition:

  1. No one should ever have to pay a fee for infrastructure, so we and our contributions will always remain fee-free.
  2. No one should have to send value to send data. So we will always have a two-pronged approach. Any person, organization or device can either send data OR send value, but they’re not forced to do one for the other.
  3. Solutions should be able to scale towards global standards, because if the solutions we’re building already have barriers stopping them from scaling to impact everyone and everything, then we’re already thinking too small. So, every solution we design, already starts with the mindset that this needs to be geared for impact socially, economically, and industrially.
  4. Data and value need to move fast. It doesn’t make sense for it to take over an hour to validate data if it’s something that’s highly critical. Near real-time capabilities will always be the goal of any IOTA enabled solution.
  5. The IOTA protocol must exist outside of the IOTA Foundation. This requires Foundation and community contributions in other integration areas, under other organizations with active and rapid development. This is one of the core mentalities of Open Source and will be something we’re going to embody to move Towards Open Collaboration.

Today, we’d like to announce another step in that direction that intrinsically appeals to these core principles. The IOTA Foundation and the FIWARE Foundation have signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding for initiating collaboration today (23 Oct 2019) at the FIWARE Summit in Berlin.  

“By connecting FIWARE with IOTA, we can bring further trust to the processes being automated through any smart solution that is ‘Powered by FIWARE’,”says Ulrich Ahle, FIWARE Foundation CEO.“We can verify context data shared with third-parties, and we can warrant the quality of data being stored in a distributed ledger. This is crucial in applications like those warranting the quality in food production, for example, the observation of certain parameters of animal welfare on farms, or when public administrations strive to ensure transparency of their processes,”complemented Juanjo Hierro, FIWARE Foundation CTO.

“By connecting FIWARE with IOTA, we can bring further trust to the processes being automated through any smart solution that is ‘Powered by FIWARE’,”says Ulrich Ahle, FIWARE Foundation CEO.“We can verify context data shared with third-parties, and we can warrant the quality of data being stored in a distributed ledger. This is crucial in applications like those warranting the quality in food production, for example, the observation of certain parameters of animal welfare on farms, or when public administrations strive to ensure transparency of their processes,”complemented Juanjo Hierro, FIWARE Foundation CTO.

This will be further expelled upon with a presentation at the Summit by IOTA Foundation Co-Founder, Dominik Schiener.

The FIWARE Foundation has made dynamic progress in the space of smart solutions and integrations with high proliferation and adoption throughout Europe. The European Commission (EC) recently formally adopted the FIWARE Context Broker technology as a core CEF Building Block. We’re happy to announce that our core initial focus area through our collaboration with FIWARE will be enabling context-aware capabilities to proliferate over the Tangle through development of IOTA capabilities into the FIWARE Context Broker. This will enable a few key capabilities:  

  • Context-aware data management on the Tangle
  • Scalable decentralization of FIWARE Context capabilities through the IOTA protocol
  • Increased interoperability with IoT sensor integrations in mutual focal verticals
  • Reduction of Dynamic Smart Solution developments through mutual development
  • A heightened security landscape for existing FIWARE solutions through decentralization and immutability
  • Large scale adoption potential through existing FIWARE integrations

To further accelerate these developments, we’d also like to announce that there will be an upcoming RFP for our respective communities to get funding for potential contributions around this integration. Keep an eye out for more details on that in the near future.

FIWARE is an open source initiative defining a universal set of standards for context data management which facilitate the development of Smart Solutions for different domains such as Smart Cities, Smart Industry, Smart Agrifood, and Smart Energy. The Context Broker is surrounded by a suite of additional platform components, which may be supplying context data (from diverse sources such as a CRM system, social networks, mobile apps or IoT sensors for example), supporting processing, analysis and visualization of data or bringing support to data access control, publication or monetization.  

FIWARE is an open source initiative defining a universal set of standards for context data management which facilitate the development of Smart Solutions for different domains such as Smart Cities, Smart Industry, Smart Agrifood, and Smart Energy. The Context Broker is surrounded by a suite of additional platform components, which may be supplying context data (from diverse sources such as a CRM system, social networks, mobile apps or IoT sensors for example), supporting processing, analysis and visualization of data or bringing support to data access control, publication or monetization.  
FIWARE — Open Source Platform for our Smart Digital Future

For more information on all the work, FIWARE is doing check out their press kit here. Another key point announced today was that FIWARE is establishing its own FIWARE Blockchain and Data Economy Tech Roadmap WGs which will be where the key communications and collaborations will be centralized. These developments will be the first milestone in our collaborative groundwork with FIWARE and will continue to scale to demo integrations through such creative mechanisms as the FIWARE Lego World 2.0 Showcaseand more.  

We’re excited to take our second step Towards Open Collaboration with FIWARE, welcoming their community into ours, and our community into theirs. The progress that FIWARE has made in recent years has been rapid and progressive for the data industry to move towards open standards with open APIs and open ecosystems. We believe this and the FIWARE approach embodies much of the core values that we believe in at the IOTA Foundation around fee-free solutions, near real-time data sharing capabilities and global scaling. We look forward to bolstering their existing capabilities through the unique data and value mechanisms offered by the IOTA protocol and bridging our existing ecosystems. Together we can work towards enabling the true open trust layer for the Internet of Things, and the internet that IOTA is capable of delivering.  

Keep an eye out in the near future for more details on what will be coming of this collaboration, and other steps Towards Open Collaboration in the near future.  

For more information on the IOTA protocol and what’s coming around the bend please subscribe to the official IOTA Foundation Blog, YouTube, andTwitter. You can also sign up for the official IOTA Foundation Newsletter and if you want to engage directly with IOTA, join our official Discord server or email us at info@iota.org.