The “Future Internet” (FI) is part of the Digital Agenda for Europe's efforts to deliver economic benefits from fast and ultra-fast Internet and interoperable applications. The European Commission (EC) provided €90 million of funding for the FI-related research in 2011, and further €210 million in 2012-2013 through the “Future Internet Public Private Partnership” (FI-PPP) FP7 Programme.
The FI-PPP aims to (i) to support an Internet-enabled service economy, (ii) to improve key ICT infrastructures of Europe's economy and society by making them better able to process massive amounts of data originating from multiple sources; (iii) to render the Internet more reliable and secure; and (iv) to allow real time information to be processed into real time services.

The FI Programme presents a real challenge and opportunity not only for IT experts but also for Scientists. This Town hall meeting shall be used to present the challenge and opportunities of the “Future Internet” to the Geoscience community, and start the discussion about the possible Geoscientists contributions:

1. As contributors of new requirements for the Future Internet core team. In this way, we may be able to straighten the issues hampering e.g. the scalability and reliability of the Geospatial service infrastructures in the lower layers of the Internet stack, rather than through workarounds at the application level.
2. As know-how and technology providers. Many Internet applications already present the information in their geo-spatial context, but hardly any state of the art solution uses the concepts architectures and standards (e.g. Sensor Web, Observation Web, model Web) to their full extent.
3. As technology end-users, providing the advanced scenarios and use cases, and assuring the proposed solutions can be easily deployed and used by Scientists (as opposed to IT-experts).