The programme will also help to transform cities into the enablers of the Data Economy

Industry bodies TM Forum and the FIWARE Foundation are co-developing a smart city API reference architecture to enable the portability and interoperability of smart city solutions as well as a repeatable data economy model.

The two sides say the initiative presents significant opportunities for cities, communications service providers, technology suppliers and other parties to realise their part in the API economy, which according to IBM, will be a $2.2 trillion market by 2018.

TM Forum is the global industry association for digital business while FIWARE Foundation is an independent open community of members committed to building an open and sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards. The aim is to ease the development of smart applications.

The collaboration is a natural extension of FIWARE’s previously announced support for TM Forum open APIs, which are widely used in the communications industry, and are now available as part of the business framework components of the FIWARE platform.

The FIWARE NGSI API provides access to contextual information about what is going on in cities in near real-time, and can be adopted by cities, service providers and technology suppliers who wish to benefit from and monetise real-time open data.

“FIWARE NGSI is becoming a de-facto standard API for real-time open data thanks to its growing adoption by cities,” said Juanjo Hierro, CTO of the FIWARE Foundation. “The collaboration with TM Forum will further drive this momentum and also support cities moving to the next phase which is to become enablers of the Data Economy.”

Carl Piva, vice president of strategic programmes at TM Forum and head of the Smart City Forum, said cities providing a digital platform business model will help unlock innovation and economic growth for their whole population as well as the broader ecosystem of service providers and suppliers.

“This is not about creating mobile apps used only by a few, but rather fostering economic growth and bringing local communities together by creating meaningful services based on what is happening in the city, covering all aspects of city life,” he said.

The collaboration between TM Forum and FIWARE also includes a series of workshops with cities wishing to develop an urban data economy as well as a smart city academy programme. They are targeting architects and developers of smart city solutions who are interested in learning how these solutions can be designed to be portable across cities adopting the Smart City API Reference Architecture.

“Smart Cities will no longer be only about performing a more efficient management of municipal services but transforming cities into enablers of an Economy of Data,” said Ulrich Ahle, CEO of the FIWARE Foundation. “The collaboration programme between TM Forum and the FIWARE Foundation will be instrumental in supporting cities that agree on this vision and wish to move into execution.”

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