FI-WARE Opens Up The IoT Future to Everyone

The open-source, Internet of Things (IoT) platform FI-WARE wants to become the core infrastructure that will empower our connected future. FI-WARE promises to support smart city infrastructure, enable intelligent factories and precision agriculture, and help entrepreneurs to carve out viable market share in a connected, IoT-enabled world. ProgrammableWeb spoke with the Chief Architect of FI-WARE, Juanjo Jose Hierro, about the progress of the open-source platform and how it will create a space at the table for innovators and businesses of all sizes.

At the latest FI-WARE Challenge announcement in southern Spain earlier this week, Jesus Maza Burgos, Vice-President of the Municipal Association of Seville said:

“FI-WARE can generate employment, offer opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses, and foster the development of applications that can improve the quality of life in cities. There are a lot of problems in cities and in companies that can be solved with the FI-WARE platform. What’s more, we have to put citizens at the center of these projects, and FI-WARE enables this.”

FI-WARE’s latest announcement sought to showcase two key components of the platform. FI-WARE is the open API platform that provides a catalog of open-source tools to enable integrations and connections for IoT and smart city application design. FI-Lab is the meeting point that encourages a community of developers and entrepreneurs to share their experiences developing applications, ask questions, and test prototypes in a sandbox environment. Future components of FI-WARE are expected to include a training system (the FI-WARE Academy); a community fund that will finance new open source tools being added to the catalog; and partnerships that will enable FI-WARE to co-opt other open source projects with similar goals (like the CKAN open data platform).