[Fiware-general-help] fiware brussel dev week blog

[Donato Cohen, Malena]

Dear Beneditk,

Nice to hear from you, where do you want us to post this info? Thanks for this nice/inspiring text….. I think you should send your stories outside FIWARE (we already know all these great benefits!) ☺

How did it go the developers week?

Best regards,

Malena

From: fiware-general-help-bounces at lists.fi-ware.org [mailto:fiware-general-help-bounces at lists.fi-ware.org] On Behalf Of benedikt herudek
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2015 2:23 PM
To: Leandro Guillen; fiware-general-help at lists.fi-ware.org
Subject: [Fiware-general-help] fiware brussel dev week blog

can we share / can I paste my blog somewhere ? nearly finished ... many links! happy to adjust here or there ... but its a blog after all, doesnt have to be perfect and will be subjective ... :-)




FIWARE <http://www.fiware.org/> is an open source cloud platform sponsored by the European Union as part of its Digital Agenda 2020<http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/future-internet-public-private-partnership>, targeted mainly at small and medium entrepreneurs (SME's) and startups. The platform intends to leverage opportunities in  digitalization in areas usually described with Internet of Things, Open Data, Big data, enhanced User Experiences for industries in a.o. e-health, smart city, e-goverment, tourism and media. The main focus currently is Smart Cities and the Internet of Things. Internet of Things is a HOT Topic, also for Accenture mobile clients like KPN<http://www.kpn.com/zakelijk/grootzakelijk/internet-of-everything-en/lora.htm>, which roll out IoT networks like LoRa.<http://lora-alliance.org/>

FIWARE has some overlaps and similarities with amazon webservice machines, e.g. one can setup a virtual machine in the cloud. The FIWARE platform is entirely open source and based on openstack<http://www.openstack.org/>. Currently, there are 16 FIWARE node datacenters in europe. Some of them are commercial adaptors<http://www.fiware.org/news/fiware-accelerator-speedupeurope-comercial-opensource/>, which use Fiware Ops Tool Suit<http://www.fiware.org/fiware-operations/>, FIWARE is therefore a federated approach, where different commercial parties are meant to interact. The program includes the attempt to not only setup european but also worldwide standards<http://www.fiware.org/tag/fiware-mundus/> and FIWARE nodes, e.g. already now in mexiko and brasil. Also with the US, Japan and South - Korea there are talks to roll out the platform or reuse its smart city standards.

FIWARE has more to offer than just some virtual machines in the cloud. One can use so-called generic enablers. These are APIs, rendered as open source, which will allow building context aware and smart applications and which we will describe more below.

If U need one reason continuing reading than that FIWARE tries to set european, if not worldwide, open and vendor independent standards and with the backing of the european commission might have chances achieving that at least in europe. There are already FIWARE standardisations achievements in the area of smart city<http://www.programmableweb.com/news/open-standards-civic-tech-apis-edge-closer-to-reality/2015/03/20>, where 31 cities from 7 (non-) european cities agree on using FIWARE standards  to adopt an open standard API  to gather, publish, query and subscribe to context information describing what happens in the city at any time. FIWARE  is not the only initiative, which tries to establish standards for Smart City Open API's<http://www.programmableweb.com/news/3-ways-open-apis-are-re-creating-life-city/2014/03/27>. Amsterdam is a.o. cities a front runner in this movement and tries to align with the FIWARE NGSI <http://waag.org/nl/project/ngsi-compliancy-citysdk-ld-api> standard.  The intention of municipalities is to create a market big and attractive enough for SME's to allow investing into high quality, cheap and scalable applications. It is hence an initiative also driven by municipalities who have an interest to create a larger market and get more independent of the large vendors.

here to stay ?

Before we dive into the architecture, we should ask the questions if FIWARE is a platform 'here to stay' ? Because Amazon Webservices certainly is ! The answer is: noone knows ! Many hope yes !

FIWARE is a result of a Public Private Partnership between the EU and professional IT companies. You have large players like eg ATOS, orange or telefonica <http://pressoffice.telefonica.com/jsp/base.jsp?contenido=/jsp/notasdeprensa/notadetalle.jsp&id=0&origen=portada&idm=eng&pais=1&elem=21261> IBM <https://www.research.ibm.com/haifa/projects/services/fi-ware/index.shtml> or fraunhofer <https://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/22fa84b37ff3f894> involved helping with services & support or delivering generic enablers.The political agenda behind is this could be sketched as follows: europe wants a common euopean digital market<http://ec.europa.eu/priorities/digital-single-market/index_en.htm>, wants to be more independent of big US commercial players and wants to promote innovation by common standards. The initiative is relatively new and currently ran a bit more than 3 years, Designed in 2010, started in 2011:  After this program finished, the platform - one hears - will be run via a foundation, i.o.w. it is meant to stay.

The initial program includes also  many accelerators, intended to help & support small teams with innovative ideas until they are transformed into a business. Some SME's working on Fiware as presented on the netfuture2015 <http://netfutures2015.eu/programme/fiware/> conference include Coffestrap <http://www.fiware.org/2015/01/29/coffeestrap-a-great-purpose-for-a-great-technology/> from Amsterdam, ETConcept<http://www.etconcept.com/> from Portugal, Usheru <http://www.fiware.org/2015/01/20/usheru-revolutionise-your-cinema-experience/> from the UK, Digital Worx<http://www.digital-worx.de/home/> from germany and Onomondo <http://onomondo.com/> from Denmark. Once again, this is organized as a public private partnership, where existing accelerators work with the EU. An example also working the netherlands is SpeedUp!Europe<http://speedupeurope.eu/>. FIWARE for prototyping in fiware labs<https://blog.accenture.com/benedikt_herudek/wp-admin/lab.fiware.org> is for free. However, only organizations working in the accelerators seem to currently get enough resources to do serious work. Eventually - one hears - production environments will be cheaper  than any commercial platform and the platform will be transitioned to a foundation to run it. There is also an education program around it, one can find training videos on youtube<https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR9elAI9JscSOuSnwIkGzSVW1QKgfDk6d>.and fiware presentations on slideshare<http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?searchfrom=header&q=fiware>, which are easier to read than the FIWARE wiki & docs.


If FIWARE is 'here to stay' will - until the platform might be profitable - depend on a political decision the EU needs to take. Currently, it seems to fair to see, there are not yet so many enterprises working on the platform and if they go live they might take free components from FIWARE and use eg an amazon machine. This might change, when there are more commercial fiware nodes. Currently clearly, an incentive to go to the platform is the EU funding in the accelerators (they don't take equity from startups!) small enterprises try to get and clearly the big players like telefoncia are also in the game for EU funds. Then again, it is not uncommon that also large commercial players push their platforms with for free offers and might monetize in a later stage only, when a community is set and a standard was built. IBM for example is pushing its bluemix<https://console.ng.bluemix.net/> developer platform, where startups can use virtual machines with cognitive services like IBM Watson<http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/what-is-watson.html>, a potentially better offer than Amazon's webservices. It's not so obvious the platform already has large communities workings around them, i.o.w. the FIWARE and the European Union is in good company here ...:-)

Independently of Technology and Commercialization: the real 'here to stay' component of FIWARE might be the worldwide smart city standards  it tries to set in europe and worldwide . One might as well work along such smart city standard on premise or in an amazon cloud.

smart means 'context aware'

FIWARE applications are all about creating smart applications and that requires being aware of the context. As one might expect, FIWARE doesnt have a patent on that idea but hooks in to a wider trend in digitalization and IoT: We have via internet and sensors these days so much and so much potentially useful data available that we would benefit from separate units of software to handle it, which are referred to as Context Brokers<https://www.gartner.com/doc/2967518/context-brokers-smarter-business-decisions>. Following Gartner 'Context Brokers for Smarter Business Decisions Published: 21 January 2015':

[gartnerContextbroker]<http://blog.accenture.com/benedikt_herudek/files/2015/03/gartnerContextbroker.png>The underlying concept of a context broker is to have a separate software facility that gathers, prepares and serves context data so that a decision maker— a person or an application system — can have the benefit of this data without having to do all of the work of obtaining and managing the context data as part of the application itself. It is essentially a design pattern for sourcing context data more efficiently and effectively, offloading work from the decision-making application. A widely used Context Broker coming as an apache license is mosquitto<http://mosquitto.org/>.

FIWARE uses that concept and adopts it mainly (for the moment) for Smart Cities and Internet of Things. FIWARE applications are therefore supposed to be smart, in the sense of context aware applications. One could say, FIWARE does mainly two things with this idea. 1st: it tries to establish a standard protocol accepted all over europe and thereby scaling a market. Technically speaking FIWARE adds to the idea of a context to model it along the ways of a simple network management protocal (SNMP), theu use a standard they call NGSI.

In that design a Context exists of so-called 'Entities', which are simply things relevant to Your application. 'Values' are attributes of these entities, which change over time.A Context could represent the reality in Your own house or in a large city with entities like shops, busses and alike.

[fiwarecontextbroker]<http://blog.accenture.com/benedikt_herudek/files/2015/03/fiwarecontextbroker.png>The FIWARE context broker layer will allow Your application to be ignorant to how these context values are rendered: The temperature in a street eg could be rendered because users placed it on twitter or rather because the municipality decides to equip buses passing the street with sensors. The FIWARE orion context broker should hide this for Your. The context model is extendable, so one can add features e.g. a value to rate certain buildings. FIWARE is build on REST (stateless) APIs, which are easy to use for developers. Payloads will use JSON or XML. If U need to know, what the status of an entity is, U just read the value of an entity. If U want to trigger an action and the device allows so, all U do is changing the value of an Attribute, U do this with simple PUT and GET calls. The context broker connects to IoT agents, which connect to the devices.
The context broker gives U ways to persist and store data with ETL tools and a MongoDB. This can be relevant for running big data anlytics over the data You gather.

Find here a visualization <http://orionexplorer.com/> of the Orion Conext Broker from a 3rd party, not supported by FIWARE itself.



The Orion Context  Broker shields U as a smart-city- developer from a complex setup of InternetOfThings Agents InternetOfThingsMessage Broker. Compare it to the (Business Activity) Monitoring solution of a Production System for  a large Client. The Technical Architecture Team will have to deploy agents monitoring the Systems, which will connect to the main System, eg a Console where U can see the status of an order or the memory consumption of a System. The infrastructure needs to be setup and maintained by a team of experts, as an end user U dont mind how this works as long as Your central instance allows You to interact with the deployed agents and the Systems connected. In Smart City and fiware world, Cities subscribing to the FIWARE standard would deliver the setup for You and You as a developer only connect to the front end, the Orion Context Broker.

The Orion Context Broker runs on top of the IoT Message Broker. This is a module introduced to handle the complexity of a large setup with 1000s of Devices and IoTAgents connecting to them. Imagine, You have an application with sensors in agriculture over large patches of lands over an entire country. Or U have a city with many sensors and complex requests like e.g.: 'Give me all cars in the street, their location and whatever else U know!'. Here, U might get several thousands of responses back and U dont know before hands. In that cases You will need a unit which handles and aggregates data for You and a unit to discover sensors in the street. A rule of thumb apparently says: with more than 1000 sensors You should add an IoT broker to Your application.

The IoT Broker will connect to the IoT agents in the field and manage them. The IoT Agents are pieces of software connecting to sensors from devices in the field. They translate IoT protocol like CoAP<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constrained_Application_Protocol> or MQTT<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQTT> into the Open Mobile Alliance NGSI<http://technical.openmobilealliance.org/Technical/release_program/docs/NGSI/V1_0-20120529-A/OMA-TS-NGSI_Context_Management-V1_0-20120529-A.pdf> standard Fiware will use. A showcase was done in Santander, Spain<http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/santander-displays-fi-ware%E2%80%99s-potential-smart-cities> as the Context Broker and the IoT standard is developed by Telefonica research center<http://www.tid.es/>.

from 'aware' to 'smart'

When U have all this data in Your application, U will use other enablers to do smart things, with the things U are aware of now. FIWARE delivers a suite on Generic Enablers, which are essentially allowing You to allow stuff around many 'hot topics' You can find these days. Often, a generic enabler is nothing but an elsewhere freely available component reused with some add-ons introduced to the platform.

FIWARE taps in also in the open data movement.  Open Data from goverment is a movement, driven very much by the obama administration<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_Initiative> and the UK with insitutions like the open data institute<http://opendatainstitute.org/>. This open data movement<http://opendatainstitute.org/blog/odi-summit-sir-tim-bernerslee-keynote-address> is a.o. pioneered by the (co-) founder of the world wide web Tim Berner Lee<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee> and connected to terms like semantic web<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web>, linked data<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_data>, which has as one of its goals to make the web machine readable, where current HTML pages are targeted at human users to consume.

[fiwaredatasetmarketplace]<http://blog.accenture.com/benedikt_herudek/files/2015/03/fiwaredatasetmarketplace.png>FIWARE uses the open source open data framework ckan<http://ckan.org/> to offers a platform and marketplace for open data. It allows publishing free data, enforcing terms & conditions and using data with a fee. The scenarios here are either cities publishing data for free or companies publishing enriched data for a fee. ckan datastore delivers search & discover functionalities to find published information

One way of enriching data is to build FIWARE mashups on top of Your dataset and visualize them this way. Such data mashups can eg be sold to newspapers to embed the information revealed in their online presence.



Where gathering sensor data from the Internet of Things is a core concept a big data analytics cannot be far. FIWARE hence offers a generic enable to analyze big data. FIWARE uses hadoop<https://hadoop.apache.org/> under the fiware codename cosmos as it's big data platform. Apache Hadoop's MapReduce and HDFS components were inspired by Google<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google> papers on their MapReduce<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce> and Google File System<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System>.

[cygnusbigdata]<http://blog.accenture.com/benedikt_herudek/files/2015/03/cygnusbigdata.png>A typical use cases of big data analytics would be that sensor data flows in via the orion context broker to an FIWARE instance eg on temperatures in the field. The Orion Context Broker itself only holds the last value of an entity. To have the historical view on temperature one will connect the orion context broker via a FIWARE component called Cygnus with hadoop, where the data will be stored and can be analyzed.  Cygnus uses the subscription/notification feature of the context broker, detailing which entities one wants to be notified when an update occurs on any of those entities attributes. Cygnus is based on apache flume<http://flume.apache.org/> and will allow to persist data from the context broker not only to hadoop but also mysql or ckan. Licenses are currently open source, at some point these components might be feedback to the apache foundation to the hadoop ecosystem.

Telefoncia delivers other add ons to hadoop called 'Tidoop'<https://github.com/telefonicaid/fiware-tidoop> intened to allow using generic non HDFS data lotaed at CKAN or Mango DB.

FIWARE offers Mashup technologies to create parts of front ends. This Mashup technology is useful for dashboards and maps, which one wants to use to embed in web pages for example to blend in a real time data camera from an open source. A 'Widget' is a building block to build a 'Mashup'. Widgets are connected to each other via 'Wires'. Backends can be accessed directly by widgets via so-called operators.  After You build such a mashup and have created a useful visualization, the mashup can be published back to the fiware catalog for reuse and for selling it on the internal store. FIWARE also offers 3D and Augmented Reality visualization frameworks<http://xml3d.org/xml3d/slides/startup-weekend/#/1/3> based on HTML5, WebGL, XML3D and XLOW.

[kurentoenabler]<http://blog.accenture.com/benedikt_herudek/files/2015/03/kurentoenabler.png>

Fiware integrates the Kurento<http://www.kurento.org/> Mediaserver in its platform. Kurento is based on WebRTC<http://www.webrtc.org/>, which is a World Wide Web Consortium standard<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebRTC> with open source delivered from google.  It allows for example to create browser communication easily, U should be able creating something like skype easily with it. Kurento is implementing this standard. Kurento is an open source platform making possible the creation of rich WebRTC and multimedia applications.For example, U will use so - called media elements, which are used for example to record videostreams. one will need one video to receieve and one media element to record the stream and one will need to connect them properly. Kurento also allows to integrate augmented reality elements in videostreams and can thereby be useful for a smart city context, e.g. by adding virtual objects like arrows where to walk to a street. It is also possible via these technologies to detect building of large groups in a city, this could be useful eg to direct police to large crowds assembling during concerts or sport events. Kurento is closely integrated with the OpenCV<http://opencv.org/> libraries, mainly aimed at real-time computer vision<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_vision> and is used for interactive art, to mines inspection, stitching maps on the web or through advanced robotics and backed by Intel<http://www.intel.eu/content/www/eu/en/homepage.html>.

As an open platform, You can use any GUI framework U like javascript or php frameworks as a base and use the described Generic Enabler for user interaction to add on to it.

regards / groetjes / adios  / gruesse

Benedikt Herudek

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 12:05 PM, Leandro Guillen <leandro.guillen at imdea.org<mailto:leandro.guillen at imdea.org>> wrote:
Hi,

This is an example of an application using some FIWARE enablers.

https://github.com/Bitergia/fiware-chanchan

Good luck!
Leandro

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