FEDeRATED workshop The Soul of the Machine

On 29 and 30 March, 52 people participated in the EU CEF FEDeRATED workshop "The Soul of the Machine", including 5 representatives of the EU CEF FENIX project. The workshop took place in Delft (the Netherlands). After 2 years of Covid-19 isolation, an important  goal of the meeting was to compare notes between the achievements of the architecture and semantics groups and the developments within the 23 FEDeRATED Living Labs. 

The images of workshop, including its participants, are available here WeFEDeRATED

A major focus of the Workshop was to allow the participants  to structurally connect and seek for opportunities to collaborate. Some energetic discussions took place between the particiants on how to foster collaboration between the  LivingLabs. eCMR in connection to eFTI, the definition of the interfaces in relation to semantics, and Identity and Access Management  proved to be important issues.

In the workshop 5 participants of the EU CEF FENIX project participated. A presentation on data sharing in the Trieste Port pitot side area was given. by Maria Pia Fanti (Poliba) . This presentation opened the floor to discuss the differenence between the general concept of the FENIX and FEDeRATED CEF projects. The primary FENIX focus is on the development and piloting of technology based connectors - brokers, ID management, access control - between different platforms. FEDeRATED focus on an overall system  interoperability, with a short term focus on the integration of semantics into the interfaces. 

For the general part of the workshop, two major presentations were delivered:

• General overview FEDeRATED semantics model (Henk Mulder)
• General overview FEDeRATED architecture (Mitchell Out)

Between 2020-2021, the FEDeRATED project seems to have developed a two-speed approach. On a conceptual level, FEDeRATED advanced very well regarding semantics and architecture issues. These insights are fully shared and acknowlegde by the EU DTLF. The question emerged, whether these insights sufficienly  meet the both-feed-on-the-ground project approach. On a practical application level, the Covid-19 period proved to be a period of rather stand alone functioning for many LivingLabs. Thereby, they missed several opportunities to fully connect  with the conceptual FEDeRATED architecture  framework developments. In addition,   fostering full stakeholder engagement within the LivingLabs proved to be difficult.

An important FEDeRATED project challenge for the upcoming period is to reduce the current gap between the architectural and semantics framework and its concrete translation  in actual FEDeRATED LivingLabs. To reduce this gap a dedicated workshop was given on how to deal with sematics in a LivingLab. See

•  Example of how to apply the FEDeRATED semantic model into a FEDeRATED Living Labs (RFID in Rail/BetTerFlow). (Kenneth and Mikael Lind)

Sandra Haraldsson drew her impression of the wortkshop (hereunder).