Data is the fuel for any smart service. So a new partnership between FIWARE and the European Data Portal is instrumental in opening a fountain of open data sources from European cities and nations able to be used in the design and delivery of new new services and applications.

The new European Open Data Portal launched on 16 November 2015 is the major European data asset available for free for anyone to use, with already around 250,000 datasets available through a multilingual interface. Users are allowed to easily download data at the source or directly consume data analysis through interactive visualizations.

The collaboration with FIWARE will help bring this data even closer to the fingertips of the growing open community of thousands of FIWARE developers, startups and new users in Europe and worldwide.

Startups – like Hostabee – are working on the FIWARE platform and are already identifying opportunities to augment their services and products by using open data.

Hostabee are winners of a past FIWARE hackathon, alum of the FIWARE Innovation Hub, and one of FIWARE’s accelerator startups. They have recently showcased their bee-keeping urban farm product at Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. Hostabee rely on open data sources to understand the vegetation in the city areas where they will be offering their services so that they can better evaluate quality and the effects on honey-making.

The capacity of a new generation of smart services like Hostabee to use open data is expected to be a major leverage point for creating an open data market that is worth €75.7 billion by 2020, according to European Open Data Portal research.

In the future, FIWARE and the EU Open Data Portal will jointly consider ways to harvest the trend towards more real-time open data by using the de-facto standard FIWARE NGSI. This collaboration among two leading European ICT initiatives shows the interest of the public and private partnership supporting these and, our capacity to set standards and is clearly another step towards a European Single Digital Market.