In previous posts we have explained what FIWARE consists of and we also explained its language and protocol, the so-called NGSI. Now, in order to have an even broader knowledge of this technology we are going to explain the different components of the FIWARE platform.
Context Broker
This component has four fundamental responsibilities. On one hand, to provide a centralized model of context that can be shared by all devices, services and agents of the space. Secondly, it is also in charge of acquiring contextual information from sources that are unreachable for devices with limited resources
The Context Broker is responsible for reasoning about that contextual information that can not be acquired directly from sensors and, finally, for protecting the user’s privacy of the shared context by enforcing policies that users have defined for the use of their contextual information.
Context information
Context information is the one managed within the Context Broker, which always stores the latest update. It is the value of the attributes that characterize those entities relevant to an application.
For a solution to be Smart, it must have information about its context. For example, the entity “Ship” can have information about its location, color and load capacity.
NGSI Protocol
This is the standard protocol used by the set of APIs (application programming interface) of the FIWARE components to perform all actions related to the management of the context information. The NGSI interface is based on a defined REST API (that is, it consists of a series of HTTP calls). The messages within the requests are sent in JSON format.
After this tour of the main FIWARE components, we hope you will have a better understanding of this technology, whose main purpose is to apply Smart solutions to different fields. If you want to know more about FIWARE, stay tuned to La Lonja de la Innovación’s blog.