The FIWARE Foundation is a non-profit association with the mission: “to build an open, sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that eases the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors.” (more)
The FIWARE open source components and open data models are building blocks to build Smart Solutions from, but it’s not an IoT platform in itself. If a platform, like Sensative’s Yggio, is based upon FIWARE, it has a high level of interchangeability, minimizing vendor lock-in. It makes FIWARE-based solutions a strong contender to the large technology vendors’ IoT solutions.
For a recent and vendor-independent competitive analysis, see this report.
Multiple IoT platforms for cities exist on the market today. How do they compare? What arguments exist on the open source vs proprietary solutions divide? How do these platforms compare in costs, functionality, security and ecosystem?
The TASC study represents a comparative market scan that aims to provide city leaders obtain insights that will help them make informed decisions in this space.
Interoperability
One of the essential differences between FIWARE and IoT platforms developed by technology vendors is the degree of openness and interoperability. The philosophy behind FIWARE is that technology should be accessible for everyone, focusing on interoperability, modularity, and customizability.
Integration
IoT is not a stand-alone technology. Data should seamlessly merge with data from other relevant sources. FIWARE provides standardized data formats and API to simplify this integration.
Open Source, minimizing vendor lock-in
FIWARE building blocks are 100% open source and can be easily embedded by ecosystem partners to design their solutions and reduce vendor lock-in risks. In addition, the standardized API means that services can operate on different vendor platforms.
Scalable at low cost
The FIWARE platform components are royalty-free in themselves, meaning that the only thing driving costs is the usage and load on the hosting environment and the costs for commercial extensions.
Low platform security
Security experts often criticize the FIWARE architecture for “not being secured by design.”
Low on functionality
FIWARE lacks visualization, geospatial analysis, and usability. It is apparent that FIWARE focuses on the core IoT platform capabilities and not so much on the tools and capabilities around the data.
Lack of vendor support
Open Source makes the code easily accessible at no cost, but it does not guarantee the operational side, such as competence transfer, implementation support, or system management.
FIWARE iHubs facilitate collaboration between scientific research, non for profit, public and private businesses, access to training and mentoring, and fostering an entrepreneurial culture and new paths for business to flourish. The ultimate goal is to focus on building communities that will, in turn, enable local digital businesses to thrive not only at a regional but on a global level.
FIWARE OIL iHub (Lund, Sweden): Focused on the domains of smart cities, smart building, smart energy, smart water, smart agrifood, smart shipping, smart transport, smart industry, and smart health, the iHub aims to – among other objectives – leverage on the existing open smart city network in Lund (LOSC) operated by FIWARE Foundation member Sensative and powered by the FIWARE compliant IoT platform Yggio as a living lab for smart research and innovation projects.
Building upon the strengths of FIWARE and at the same time effectively removing the criticized points, we have built Yggio and an extensive ecosystem of solution and services providers.
We have added multi-layered security capabilities into the architecture, enabling easy identification of issues and safeguarding data, devices, and IT systems.
Through the Yggio technology abstraction layer, LENS, we can integrate any IoT technology.LENS normalizes any IoT data or event into FIWARE standard data models for further brokering and processing.
The Ratatosk project is an implementation of the FIWARE Orion Publish/Subscribe Context Broker GE.Ratatosk provides a modern and well-structured implementation written entirely in Node JS.
A versatile and robust mechanism for implementing scenarios and event handling in your network. It is an IF/THEN workflow builder designed explicitly for IoT events and data. An event can trigger actuators or other rules, and it is available through the Yggio API. This means that several services can share the same rules.
Yggio uses AI / Machine Learning mainly for data quality control, anomaly detection, and as a more advanced machine learning-based extension to the rules engine.
There are many data model standards in different industries and customer implementations. Besides FIWARE, Yggio supports RealEstateCore, CKAN, and many more and can easily be extended to meet specific customer demands.
Yggio is modularized into microservices, executed in Docker, and orchestrated with Kubernetes to provide an IoT platform built for flexibility, efficiency, scalability, and robustness.
A common control panel for users, organizations, security, any IoT device, and any technology. Manage everything in one dashboard.
Professional apps and support tolls to provide a seamless and efficient installation process when you are deploying hundreds or thousands of IoT devices in the field.
Since Yggio focuses on IoT interoperability we have decided to provide integrations to leading tools and partners, rather than developing our own modules.
Yggio has strong integration with the data management platform City Innovation Platform by our partner Civity, experts in the field of city data. The platform provides:
The Data Management Framework is the core of the City Innovation Platform for collecting, processing, and storing data from IoT as well as many other data sources, with a focus on data quality, security, privacy, common data models, and tools for storing open, linked, and big data.
The Data Market is where all types of data are made available, following license, price models, and access rights that the provider of the data determines. In the Data Market catalog, requesters can access data via standardized APIs (with associated tools).
PowerBI by Microsoft is a popular business analytics service that delivers insights to enable fast, informed decisions.
T-kartor is a leading provider of geospatial products and services for municipalities and defense customers all over the world.
T-Kartor creates and maintains geographical information, maps, and charts. They develop solutions to deliver data, information, and products in innovative ways, including live IoT data provided through the Yggio API.
Data Infrastructure Management System (DiMS)
November 28, 2024, Lund, Sweden, Berlin – Sensative, a leading IoT company, FIWARE Foundation, the non-profit organization that encourages the adoption of open standards using
