FI-WARE Incorporates the Open Mobile Alliance’s Next Generation Service Interface

The Future Internet Public Private Partnership (PPP) Programme and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) announced today that the OMA Next Generation Services Interface (NGSI) Enabler has been adopted for use in the PPP Programme’s FI-WARE Project. FI-WARE facilitates the development of Future Internet (FI) applications in multiple industry sectors through a novel service infrastructure, building upon elements called Generic Enablers (GE), which offer reusable and commonly shared functions. Multiple industry players including NEC, Orange, Telecom Italia and Telefónica are involved in the FI-WARE Project.

“OMA is very pleased to see FI-WARE’s adoption of NGSI, which further underlines the increasing success and range of OMA service enablers being implemented in the marketplace,” said Mark Cataldo, OMA Board Chairman.

OMA NGSI is part of the OMA API Program, an activity aimed at standardizing interfaces to expose device capabilities and network resources to any developer community in an open, programmable and secure way. Approved and publicly released in its final version in May 2012, OMA NGSI focuses on creating a set of open APIs to enable next generation services to be developed and used in areas enhancing quality of life for individuals, enabling business practice innovation for corporations, and benefiting public safety and medical services for society.

“We have chosen the OMA NGSI as an inter-industrial and cross-application domain standard covering all needs for efficient and decoupled communication between different FI actors and components,” said Boris Moltchanov, Co-coordinator of Data and Context Chapter at FI-WARE. “This is very important for the ICT sector building an open and standard FI platform supporting a broad range of services worldwide.”

The data model and API defined in the OMA NGSI Enabler have been adopted and provided with a RESTful binding within the FI-WARE Project. FI-WARE’s NGSI dedicated team identified specific improvements and potential evolutions of NGSI, which were provided to OMA to improve the OMA NGSI specification and to align it with industry needs and future Internet use cases and scenarios.

“I’m very pleased to see that the OMA API program is gathering interest and being used by FI-WARE and the industry at large,” stated Francesco Vadalà, OMA Technical Plenary Chair. “The OMA Technical Plenary is happy to receive feedback and proposals for enhancement of our API program coming from real implementations.”

Proposed and strongly supported by NEC, Orange, Telecom Italia and Telefónica, FI-WARE’s NGSI specification uses many OMA NGSI functionalities and includes:

• The FI-WARE Publish/Subscribe GE Open Specification and Reference Implementations provided by Telecom Italia and Telefónica
• The IoT-Broker Reference Implementation provided by NEC
• The Data Handling GE Reference Implementation provided by Orange

NGSI can be used at different levels of granularity, allowing the publish-subscribe pattern at different FI-WARE software levels to maintain context persistence and consistency.

Use Case Project (UCP) teams are currently experimenting with the first releases of the FI-WARE Platform GEs, which are available on a testbed to provide early feedback on results of the project. The evolution of the FI-WARE testbed into a FI-WARE Open Innovation Lab, open to third parties for experimentation, is expected in 2013.

“The evolution of the FI-WARE testbed and Open Innovation Lab, together with the solid commitment of the FI-WARE Partners to bring results to the market, will ensure a wide adoption of FI-WARE technologies by the community of developers worldwide,” said Juanjo Hierro Chief Architect and Technical Manager at FI-WARE. “Therefore, the usage and the impact of the FI-WARE results exposing the OMA based Next Generation Service Interface are potentially very large.”