Leveraging the Future Internet for the Environmental Usage Area Denis Havlik 1 , Sven Schade 2 , Wout van Wijk 3 , Thomas Usländer 4 , Juanjo Hierro 5 Abstract In order to address part of today’s grand scientific challenges and political agendas related to future Information and Communication Technology (ICT), the Information Society and Media Directorate General of the European Com- mission provided a novel scheme for innovation projects funded by the European Commission: the Future Internet Public-Private-Partnership (FI-PPP) as part of the Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development. Eleven projects addressing the first of three intended program phases have been launched in Spring 2011. They comprise a large project dedicated to core Future Internet (FI) technology that is called FI-WARE; eight Usage Area projects, which deal with the requirement capture and functional component specifications of diverse application domains of the FI; and two support actions, one for capacity building, the other for collaboration support within and beyond the FI-PPP Programme. This paper explains the inner workings of the FI-PPP Programme, espe- cially in relation to the Environmental Usage Area project, called ENVIROFI. This paper explains the overall rele- vance of the FI-PPP in terms of future eEnvironment services and Public Sector Information in Europe. It also out- lines how the required contributions to the FI will be implemented, especially by detailing the interaction between ENVIROFI and FI-WARE. An outlook to a possible future of environmental ICT in Europe is included. 1. Introduction The Future Internet Public-Private-Partnership (FI-PPP) Programme is an experimental research program of the Information Society and Media Directorate General of the European Commission (DG-INSFO) as part of the recovery package. The FI-PPP urges short delays between the project proposal and project start, demands strong co-operation among the research projects, and carries the opportunity to develop the ini- tial ideas into products to be tested in large scale trials for the most successful consortia. The FI-PPP ad- dresses the key societal challenges stated in the Digital Agenda for Europe (ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda) and in the Innovation Union (ec.europa.eu/research/innovation-union) flagship initiatives. The central project of the FI-PPP Programme is called FI-WARE (www.fi-ware.eu). It comprises a con- sortium consisting of major European Information and Communication Technology (ICT) organizations and aims at establishing the Core Platform for Future Internet (FI). This Core Platform features a con- sistent set of components, so called Generic Enablers, allowing: (1) creation, publishing, managing and consuming the Future Internet services; (2) deploying the Future Internet services on the cloud, i.e. using cloud computing technologies; (3) accessing, processing and analyzing massive data streams, as well as semantically classifying them into valuable knowledge; (4) leveraging the ubiquity of heterogeneous, re- source-constrained devices in the Internet of Things; and (5) accessing the networks and devices through consistent service interfaces. 1 AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, email denis.havlik@ait.ac.at 2 EC-JRC, Institute for Environment and Sustainability, email: sven.schade@jrc.ec.europa.eu 3 European Commission DG Information Society & Media, email: wout.van-wijk@ec.europa.eu 4 Fraunhofer IOSB, email: thomas.uslaender@iosb.fraunhofer.de 5 Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo S.A., Madrid, Spain, email: jhierro@tid.es EnviroInfo 2011: Innovations in Sharing Environmental Observations and Information Copyright 2011 Shaker Verlag Aachen, ISBN: 978-3-8440-0451-9