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 will be allocated 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 geo-scientists. This Town hall meeting shall therefore be used to:

1) present the key characteristics of the upcoming core platform of the Future Internet, the “FI-Ware”;
2) present the "specific enablers" for environmental and geospatial usage areas which are currently designed in ENVIROFI project; and
3) discuss the advantages, shortcomings, and suggestions for improvements of both the FI-Ware as the underlying platform for advanced geo-spatial services and applications, and the specific enablers proposed by ENVIROFI.

This townhall session is organised by the ENVIROFI team, on behalf of the FI-PPP programme. All findings and suggestions shall be communicated to FI-Ware and other FI-PPP projects through programme-level architecture board.

More information on the FI-PPP, participating projects and envisaged developments can be discovered through www.fi-ppp.eu portal.