The city is a vast and complex ecosystem. Digital transformation lifts this ecosystem into the virtual domain. Yet, without structure, this vast amount of data is useless. The European Commission’s Context Broker, developed under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) helps turn raw data into analysable information.

At the FIWARE Smart Cities, “Towards a sustainable single market of smart city solutions” conference in November 2020, Joao Rodrigues Frade, Head of Sector for the digital building blocks at the European Commission’s informatics department (DIGIT) spoke about how the Commission is providing the tools for cities to become smart.

Common problems and common solutions

Mr Frade explained the motivation behind the Commission’s provision of common and reusable solutions. Cities, like public administrations, “have common problems” in the process of digitalising. He noted, “we probably can get common solutions and we can use these building blocks to build our future public services and put them online in a secure way. We as the Commission want to promote a common way to solve problems and to solve it with common standards and technical specifications, so that we create an ecosystem that is coherent and consistent.” You can listen to Mr Frade discussing building blocks the ‘Smart and Sustainable Cities’ podcast here.

The Context Broker is a set of tools that helps organisations – such as current or emerging Smart Cities – make sense of the data they collect. It gathers disparate data sets and aggregates this into unified and analysable data that can be contextualised with each other. In this sense, the Context Broker helps public administrations break down data silos, not only within the city, but also in between cities. It also supports the implementation of the Once Only Principle by connecting datasets, creating interoperable services that ask citizens only once for their data and share it between services (even across borders, with respect to EU data protection rules).

Reusable and interoperable

Interoperability is ensured by relying on an accepted European standard, the NGSI-LD standard, specifying an open API for Context Information Management. Thus, the Context Broker is a solution offered for reuse by the European Commission, yet as Mr Frade said during the FIWARE Smart Cities conference, “building blocks are not just software. They are fundamentally standards and technical specifications that everyone can look into, build a solution or buy from the market a solution that complies with the same standard or technical specification and therefore become interoperable.” Building blocks like the Context Broker package standards and technical specifications together with services (such as conformance testing) to create a reusable digital solutions that can interoperate.

Public administrations can use the Context Broker in three ways:

• Use the CEF Context Broker reference implementation, and benefit from its supporting services such as a sandbox environment, a helpdesk and trainings.
• Either buy or re-use any software that is conformant to the NGSI-LD API
• Build their own based on NGSI-LD API specifications

Those reusing CEF Context Broker have the opportunity to use the latest NGSI-LD standard, supporting NGSIv2 as well, ensuring that existing NGSIv2-based applications can run without problems.

With the work undertaken through CEF, the European Commission aims to interlink numerous, strategic European policy initiatives. The standard underlying Context Broker is part of the MIMs (minimum interoperability mechanisms). CEF building blocks are also intended to realise EU data governance and data spaces and help businesses, projects and administrations deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CEF Context Broker is one of the solutions that the European Commission is providing to public administrations and businesses, especially SMEs and startups. It is part of a catalogue of building blocks that interconnect Europe’s diffuse national IT landscapes.