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How to start with FIWARE?

I'm new with FIWARE and I'm disoriented by the large amount of information related to this platform, the amount of components called Generic Enablers that exists. I don't know where to start.

Any advice?

Thanks!

Solution

  • The best place to start would be the FIWARE Developer's Website - this gives you an overview as to what FIWARE is and how the various enablers fit together

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    • Core Context Management holds the state of the system and allows other elements to subscribe to changes of state
    • IoT and Robots provides sensor data and transforms it into the NGSI standard interface
    • Processing/Analysis/Visualization provides dashboards and complex event processing
    • The pillar on the right - API management adds security, as well as interface to systems to publish data externally.
    • Deployment tools helps the instantiation of a FIWARE system easier

    If you are looking for more information, the Tour Guide describes each enabler in depth and holds a series of link to Videos, User Guides, presentation and so on.

    If you learn-by-doing the Tutorials will present a series of exercises to build up a "Powered by FIWARE" application - it also describes how various Generic enablers fit together. The first six tutorial concentrate on the use of the Orion Context Broker which forms the central block of FIWARE.

    Basically the the NGSI v2 standard provides a common interface to allow a series of disparate building blocks to talk to each other using a common language, these are things you're probably going to need in a generic Smart application, but are not unique to your application - you would be providing the "special sauce" by either creating custom sensors sending context data into the system (i.e. the block at the bottom), or complex processing algorithms which are reading and altering the context state (i.e. the block at the top).

    If you want to speed development you can buy-not-build and use the existing free open source generic enablers. The whole system is modular so its easier to experiment and add and refactor things as necessary.