Collaboration delivers standard REST-based APIs for enabling open sustainable ecosystems
MORRISTOWN, NJ—November 19, 2015—TM Forum, the global industry association for digital business, today announced that it is working with FIWARE, an open cloud-based platform for the creation and delivery of applications and services, to deliver the key building blocks for enabling and connecting Smart City ecosystems.
TM Forum is supporting FIWARE NGSI REST-based APIs for real-time access to contextual information for cities. This enables more efficient management of municipal services in areas such as mobility, water, waste, energy and environmental management, and also paves the way for the development of smart applications by third parties.
“Valuable real-time information will be shared across vertical management solutions currently working as silos, while at the same time fueling new innovative services when published as real-time open data,” said Juanjo Hierro, coordinator and chief architect of FIWARE & CTO Industrial IoT, Telefónica. Cities can therefore make better decisions based on data from multiple sources, such as real-time environmental data and traffic management patterns.
In turn, TM Forum’s Ecosystem APIs, including Product Catalog, Product Ordering and Product Inventory, will be incorporated within the specifications and open source reference implementation of the FIWARE Business Framework. This Framework enables the management and the monetization of different kinds of digital assets involving multiple partners. TM Forum’s lightweight REST-based APIs have been crowdsourced from within TM Forum’s diverse membership over the past three years and leverage more than 25 years of TM Forum’s complex management systems expertise in billing, catalog management, service level agreements and policy. FIWARE will launch the new Business Framework, powered by TM Forum’s Ecosystem APIs, at Mobile World Congress 2016.
“Leveraging TM Forum’s APIs and FIWARE’s real-time city data creates a vibrant environment for third party developers to thrive within an open innovative ecosystem,” said Joann O’Brien, vice president of Industry Collaboration, TM Forum.
Collaboration in Practice
Most recently, the collaboration between TM Forum and FIWARE was showcased at the Smart City Hackathon during TM Forum Live! 2015 in Nice, France, where FIWARE real-time city data was used to create the two winning applications: an automatized cleaning solution for public spaces and green areas, and a traffic diversion application that visually displays localized pollution data to drivers based on a clustered CO2 sensor algorithm.
The Hackathon was a significant stepping stone in the formation of TM Forum’s Smart City Forum. “TM Forum’s Smart City Forum will grow to include 100+ leading smart cities and governments, the top 10 global Smart City research groups, 10 Smart City Innovation Centers and hundreds of suppliers, service providers and international bodies from wider smart city ecosystems,” said Carl Piva, vice president of Strategic Programs & Leader of the Smart City Forum. “The combination of our business-focused APIs that make it easy to create flexible urban digital ecosystems and FIWARE’s contextual APIs that can access real-time city data, will make it faster and easier to create applications that can be replicated across cities.”
Patrice Slupowski, vice president of Digital Innovation for Orange, further elaborates: “The combined use of TM Forum’s business management APIs and the FIWARE platform will facilitate the creation of interoperable ecosystems of services for smart cities. In Orange, we are great believers of standard APIs, and we are very optimistic that the FIWARE Business Framework will help to create a solid basis for a creative and powerful ‘Economy of Data.’”
This collaboration will enable cities who have joined the global Open & Agile Smart Cities (OASC) initiative – which looks to FIWARE NGSI as one of its three cornerstone mechanisms – to boost the creation of sustainable smart city ecosystems by bringing in the kind of digital infrastructures needed to develop the ‘Economy of Data’ vision, based on the fundamental requirements of transparency, security and trust.
“Cities prioritize sustainable economic development above all, but it has become clear that in order to achieve this, we need a harmonized global smart city market that connects to local realities. Common standards, which are practical and easy to use, are key for cities that want to be open and agile,” says Martin Brynskov, chair of the OASC initiative. The OASC initiative comprises more than 75 cities from 15 countries and aims to create a sustainable global market for smart city applications through the adoption of common APIs, data models and platforms, and by promoting them as de facto standards based on widespread implementation.
The next stage of this industry collaboration will include the development of Open Source Charging and Revenue Sharing components integrated with TM Forum’s Billing, Product Inventory and Usage Management API-derived components. These APIs will enable significantly improved capabilities to manage automated billing and payment supporting pay per use, even when occurring in a complex multi-partner context.
Resources
- TM Forum’s Ecosystem APIs table
- FIWARE website
- TM Forum’s Smart City Forum: Program overview, Catalyst projects, community signup, videos, and more
- Smart City trends, articles, interviews, videos, and opinions on TM Forum Inform™
- Winners of the TM Forum Smart City Hackathon from TM Forum Live! 2015
- OASC website and list of Open & Agile Smart Cities
About FIWARE
FIWARE is an independent open community whose members are committed to build an open sustainable ecosystem around standards that will ease the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors.
The FIWARE Community is not only formed by contributors to the technology (the FIWARE platform) but also those who contribute in building the FIWARE ecosystem and making it sustainable over time. As such, individuals and organizations committing relevant resources in FIWARE Lab activities or activities of the FIWARE Accelerator, FIWARE mundus or FIWARE iHubs programs are also considered members of the FIWARE community.
About TM Forum
TM Forum is the global industry association for digital business, connecting talented individuals, leading companies, and diverse ecosystems to accelerate our members’ successful digital business transformation. The collective experience and interests of our member community – comprised of tens-of-thousands of professionals within 950+ market-leading global enterprises, service providers and technology suppliers that together account for trillions of dollars in annual revenues – drives everything we do, from thought-provoking research and publications, to practical guidance, collaboration programs, tools and best practices, hands-on events, and training for business and IT leaders.
Through three key programs – Agile Business and IT, Open Digital Ecosystem, and Customer Centricity – we provide an open platform for our members to connect and collaborate with individuals and groups from around the world to solve key challenges and rapidly innovate to deliver new services, improve business agility, partner for success, reduce cost and risk, and enhance customer value and loyalty. To accelerate your R&D and join our digital journey as a valued member and collaborator, please visit www.tmforum.org.
Press Contacts:
Hanah Johnson
March Communications on behalf of TM Forum
[email protected]
+1 617 960 9875
Angeles Tejado
OgilvyOne on behalf of FIWARE
[email protected]