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The use of UAVs in areas ranging from agriculture over urban services to entertainment or simply as a hobby has rapidly grown over the last years. Regarding serious/commercial applications, UAVs have been considered in the literature, especially as mobile sensing/actuation platforms (i.e., as a delivery platform for an increasingly wide range of sensors and actuators). With regard to timely, cost-effective and very rich data acquisition, both, NEC Research as well as TNO are pursuing investigations into the use of UAVs and swarms of UAVs for scenarios where high-resolution requirements, prohibiting environments or tight time constraints render traditional approaches ineffective. In this review article, we provide a brief overview of safety and security-focused application areas that we identified as main targets for industrial and commercial projects, especially in the context of intelligent autonomous systems and autonomous/semi-autonomously operating swarms. We discuss a number of challenges related to the deployment of UAVs in general and to their deployment within the identified application areas in particular. As such, this article is meant to serve as a review and overview of the literature and the state-of-the-art, but also to offer an outlook over our possible (near-term) future work and the challenges that we will face there.

Global IoT services (GIoTS) are combining locally available IoT resources with Cloud-based services. They are targeting world-wide services. GIoTS require interoperability between the locally installed heterogeneous IoT systems. Semantic processing is an important technology to enable data mediation as well as knowledgebased processing. This paper explains a system architecture for achieving world-wide semantic interoperability using international standards like oneM2M and the OMA NGSI-9/10 context interfaces (as used in the European Future Internet Platform FIWARE). Semantics also enables the use of Knowledge-based Semantic Processing Agents. Furthermore, we explain how semantic verification enables the testing of such complex systems.

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The ever-increasing acceleration of technology evolution in all fields is rapidly changing the architectures of datadriven systems towards the Internet-of-Things concept. Many general and specific-purpose IoT platforms are already available.This article introduces the capabilities of the FIWARE framework that is transitioning from a research to a commercial level. We base our exposition on the analysis of three real-world use cases (global IoT market, analytics in smart cities, and IoT augmented autonomous driving) and their requirements that are addressed with the usage of FIWARE. We highlight the lessons learnt during the design, implementation and deployment phases for each of the use cases and their critical issues. Finally we give two examples showing that FIWARE still maintains openness to innovation: semantics and privacy. 5

Ontologies will be crucial for the future development of Next Generation Service Delivery Platforms. While various projects have defined ontologies for the mobile domain, there is yet little agreement on a common semantic model. One reason is the intrinsically hard problem of finding, using, mapping and evolving already existing ontologies. In this paper we present the Mobile Ontology, an effort within the IST project SPICE to converge towards a standardized ontology. Our approach is based on a minimal core ontology that defines common concepts for sub-ontologies of relevant domains and that is easily extensible towards existing and future ontologies. It is our intention to make this ontology available to other projects and collaboratively work on standardized ontology for the mobile domain.

Understanding crowd mobility behaviors would be a key enabler for crowd management in smart cities, benefiting various sectors such as public safety, tourism and transportation. This article discusses the existing challenges and the recent advances to overcome them and allow sharing information across stakeholders of crowd management through Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. The article proposes the usage of the new federated interoperable semantic IoT platform (FIESTA-IoT)

All of the objects in the real world are envisioned to be connected and/or represented, through an infrastructure layer, in the virtual world of the Internet, becoming Things with status information. Services are then using the available data from this Internet-of-Things (IoT) for various social and economical benefits which explain its extreme broad usage in very heterogeneous fields. Domain administrations of diverse areas of application developed and deployed their own IoT systems and services following disparate standards and architecture approaches that created a fragmentation of things, infrastructures and services in vertical IoT silos. Coordination and cooperation among IoT systems are the keys to build “smarter” IoT services boosting the benefits magnitude. This article analyses the technical trends of the future IoT world based on the current limitations of the IoT systems and the capability requirements. We propose a hyper-connected IoT framework in which “things” are connected to multiple interdependent services and describe how this framework enables the development of future applications. Moreover, we discuss the major limitations in today’s IoT and highlight the required capabilities in the future. We illustrate this global vision with the help of two concrete instances of the hyper-connected IoT in smart cities and autonomous driving scenarios. Finally, we analyse the trends in the number of connected “things” and point out open issues and future challenges. The proposed hyper-connected IoT framework is meant to scale the benefits of IoT from local to global.