FIWARE Platform for Smart Cities
FIWARE is born as the result of a public-private collaboration between the European Commission and the private sector. This open platform, which provides a set of tools for different functionalities, is an innovation ecosystem for the creation of new applications and Internet services. It is especially useful in terms of Smart Cities, as it ensures the interoperability and the creation of standard data models.
In this context, being "Smart" requires first being "Aware", that is, implementing a Smart City requires gathering and managing context information describing the current and historic state of the cities. This context information refers to the values of attributes charterizing relevant entities of city services, governance, and third party apps. In this regard, Smart applications and services for cities do need information about everything happening at every moment, and thus have access to this context information. FIWARE provides a mechanism to generate, collect, publish or query massive context information and use it for applications to react to their context. This is a complex process, as this information may come from different sources: systems, mobile apps’ users, sensor networks, etc. It is our Context Broker, through a REST implementation of API OMA NGSI, which allows to shape and access it, whatever the source is.
The use and management from data coming from “Things” (i.e. sensors, actuators and other devices) is also a complex process, as there are many different protocols in the IoT sphere, but FIWARE provides a set of GEs allowing to access the relevant information through only one API (NGSI). It not only allows to read this sensor information, but also to act on some elements. Therefore, Context Broker is an essential part of the architecture to collect data, analyse them on real time, consult archives and their analysis, as well as to publish them as open data from a city. On the other hand, other functionalities such as business intelligence, web interfaces and advanced interfaces allow the creation of very powerful applications and solutions.
FIWARE IoT Stack
The FIWARE IoT Stack Documentation describes how to connect devices and receive data, integrating all device protocols and connectivity methods, understanding and interpreting relevant information. It isolates data processing and application service layers from the device and network complexity, in terms of access, security and network protocols.
FIWARE « ORION » Context Broker
Orion Context Broker allows you to manage all the whole lifecycle of NGSI context information including updates, queries, registrations and subscriptions. Using the Orion Context Broker, you are able to register context elements and manage them through updates and queries. In addition, you can subscribe to context information so when some condition occurs (e.g. an interval of time has passed or the context elements have changed) you receive a notification.
The Orion Context Broker Documentation describes in detail how to interact with the Context Broker, and thus, how to use the NGSI API for managing context information. On the other hand, this documentation describes how to deploy a dedicated instance of the Orion Context broker.
You can find the source code of Orion in the FIWARE Context Broker Github repository
FIWARE Device Backend Gateway (IDAS)
Available NGSI Endpoints
- Context broker endpoint: http://orion.lab.fiware.org:1026/
- To reach some Santander sensors
- urn:smartsantander:testbed:10002 (santander:lux)
- urn:x-iot:smartsantander:u7jcfa:fixed:t3314 (santander:device)
- urn:smartsantander:testbed:481 (santander:soundacc)
- urn:smartsantander:testbed:3314 (santander:traffic)
- urn:smartsantander:testbed:3315 (santander:traffic)