The key resources of the FIWARE Foundation are its more than 325 members from more than 35 countries, the more than 150 open source projects, the more than 160 “Powered by FIWARE” solutions, the 8000 developers using FIWARE technologies, the more than 100 evangelists, the 16 FIWARE iHubs, the 10 FIWARE Lab Nodes, and its 15 Strategic partnerships.

The offered value proposition is an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that will ease the creation of Smart Applications in multiple sectors. Using FIWARE technologies, organizations can capture the opportunities that are emerging with the new wave of digitalisation brought by combining the Internet of Things with Context Information Management and Big Data services on the Cloud, and developers can gather context information at large scale from many different sources. FIWARE also helps to easily process, analyse and visualize managed context information, easing the implementation of the smart behaviour and the enhanced user experience required by next-generation Smart Applications.

The main customer segment are public or private organizations and their associated developers who are interested in context data management in order to facilitate the development of smart solutions in various domains such as health, cities, industry, agri-food, energy, etc. End users are also the beneficiaries of the developed smart solutions.

The main channels are the FIWARE Community, Events (such as Hackathons, Conferences, Workshops, Fair, Summits, Info Sessions), the Accelerator programme and the Marketplace. In specific, FIWARE was built thanks to the joint efforts of different actors and now goes a step further in the creation of a community to gather web entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, students, academia, industry and public sector innovators to keep progressing with three goals in mind: 1) Expand the reach of FIWARE at a global level, 2) Set new innovation hubs around the world, 3) Create a European environment of innovative business hubs. Sixteen (16) FIWARE Accelerators exist, where funding is provided for the most talented teams and business proposals building upon FIWARE technology. FIWARE organizes or participates at Hackathons, Conferences, Workshops,  Webinars, Fairs and Summits throughout the world, where the audience can meet the FIWARE people and technologies. The FIWARE Marketplace serves the purpose of globally disseminating existing commercial offerings around FIWARE. It is a global one-stop shop that gives visibility to a wide range of solutions/ platforms powered by FIWARE, FIWARE-ready technologies as well as FIWARE related training/coaching or consultancy, integration and support services.

Apart from the aforementioned endeavours focusing on getting, keeping and growing their customer base, FIWARE Foundation are also offering the following free services towards improving their customer relationship: a) FIWARE Lab, a non-commercial sandbox environment of the FIWARE Community, which offers the capability to innovate and experiment with the FIWARE Technologies. Entrepreneurs and individuals can test FIWARE technologies as well as their applications within the FIWARE Lab, with the possibility to exploit Open Data published by cities and other organizations. b) FIWARE Academy, a list of video tutorials, slide decks and other training materials available for developers learning about the FIWARE Ecosystem. In addition to the training materials for each individual GE, there are some integrated courses that have been recorded.

Regarding costs, since the platform is provided for free, the cost is mainly associated with the resources needed to a) install, configure and deploy the platform components and build the required functionality on top of it (fixed cost), and b) run the platform components (fixed or monthly per-user cost, dependent on whether the platform will be deployed on local or cloud resources). Hence the cost is highly dependent on the use case requirements in terms of functionality and the user base to be served. The more FIWARE GEs are used the more VMs need to be employed (according to the specification of each GE there might be a recommendation for 1 GE per VM), and the greater the user base is the more resources should be allocated to each VM, hence the greater the cost.

Finally, the main revenue stream seems to be the subscription fees associated with becoming a member of the FIWARE Foundation.

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The Service layer mainly encapsulates a Context Broker GE, which is the core and mandatory component of any FIWARE-based solution, which enables to manage context information (perform updates and bring access to context) in a highly decentralized and large-scale manner. The Broker keeps virtual representations of the physical devices, hence interaction with devices happens by updating and modifying the virtual representations attached/corresponding to them. From an architectural point of view, the Context Broker acts as a blackboard in a typical blackboard architecture. It is the core and control piece of the platform, in charge of interacting with the other components and agglutinate data. Therefore, Context Broker plays a key role when developing a data/context scenario. A number of Data/Context Management FIWARE GEs are available or under incubation, such as the Orion Context Broker GE that currently provides the FIWARE NGSI v2 Restful API enabling to perform updates, queries or subscribe to changes on context information, and the Orion-LD Context Broker GE and the Scorpio Broker GE that support the ETSI NGSI-LD API specifications.

The service layer further includes components accompanying a Context Broker as part of Core Context Management, such as the STH Comet GE that brings the means for storing a short-term history of context data (typically months) on MongoDB, the Cygnus GE that brings the means for managing the history of context that is created as a stream of data which can be injected into multiple data sinks, including some popular databases like PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB or AWS DynamoDB as well as BigData platforms like Hadoop, Storm, Spark or Flink, the Draco GE that is an alternative data persistence mechanism for managing the history of context based on Apache NiFi and is a dataflow system based on the concepts of flow-based programming which supports powerful and scalable directed graphs of data routing, transformation, and system mediation logic and also offers an intuitive graphical interface, and the QuantumLeap GE that supports the storage of context data into a time series database (CrateDB and Timescale).

The Service layer also includes a number of FIWARE GEs for making it easier to interface with the Internet of Things devices (IoT devices Backend) as well as Robots and Third-party systems for the purpose of gathering valuable context information or trigger actuations in response to context updates. Since devices have a lot of differences and particularities making it impossible to provide a solution where one size fits all, and the platform needs to be able to support and integrate a number of heterogeneous devices, a modular approach is followed. IoT Agents act as translators between the protocols that devices use to send or receive information and the common language and data model across all the platform, i.e. FIWARE NGSI. The IDAS GE offers a wide range of IoT Agents making it easier to interface with devices using the most widely used IoT protocols (LWM2M over CoaP, JSON or UltraLight over HTTP/MQTT, OPC-UA, Sigfox or LoRaWAN), while a number of incubated GEs bring open source implementations of modern standards for the communication with IoT devices and Robotics, as well as the exchange of electronic data and documents in reliable and trusted ways. FIWARE also enables solution builders to create their own IoT Agents in order to be able to connect to and use any type of device available now or in the future.

In the Application layer, we can distinguish between a) the  FIWARE Marketplace platform that can be used to locate and purchase FIWARE-based solutions and b) the FIWARE platform components (GEs) which can be used by developers and providers of a solution to enable b1) the management and monetization of applications, services and data in a business framework across their whole service life cycle or b2) the processing, analysis and visualisation of context.

The FIWARE Marketplace serves the purpose of globally disseminating existing commercial offerings around FIWARE. It is a global one-stop shop that gives visibility to a wide range of solutions/ platforms powered by FIWARE, FIWARE-ready technologies as well as FIWARE related training/coaching or consultancy, integration and support services.

On the FIWARE GEs side, there are Generic Enablers that can be utilised to build an ecosystem of applications, services and data delivery that is sustainable and fosters innovation as well as cross-fertilization. In particular, these support managing of applications, services and data in a business framework across its whole service life cycle, starting from creation through composition of applications and data to publication, monetization and revenue sharing. The CKAN extensions GE brings a number of add-ons enabling to extend current capabilities of the world-leading CKAN Open Data publication platform to allow publication of datasets matching right-time context data, the assignment of access terms and policies to those datasets and the assignment of pricing and pay-per-use schemas to datasets, the Biz Framework GE brings backend support to Context API/Data monetization based on open TM Forum Business APIs, Idra GE is able to federate existing Open Data Management Systems based on heterogeneous technologies (e.g. CKAN, SOCRATA, DKAN etc.) providing a single API and a standard metadata format (DCAT-AP) to discover open datasets, the APInf API Management Framework is a tool for API owners to manage their APIs that provides all the necessary features to run business with APIs and makes it easy for API consumers to find and start using the standard APIs. The Application Mashup GE aims at allowing end users without programming skills to quickly compose beautiful web applications and dashboards/cockpits mashing up widgets, operators and data sources from a shared catalogue. The Data Visualisation GE aims at creating agile, beautiful visualizations and meaningful reports useful to present the large variety of datasets. Data stakeholders will bring in the play as well as providing customisable data analytics.

There are further FIWARE GEs available for making it easier to process, analyse or visualize context information for the purpose of implementing the Application layer of a solution and enabling the “smart behaviour” expected. The Wirecloud GE brings a powerful web mashup platform making it easier to develop operational dashboards which are highly customizable by end users, the Knowage GE brings a powerful Business Intelligence platform enabling to perform business analytics over traditional sources and big data systems build on context history, the Kurento GE enables real-time processing of media streams supporting the transformation of video cameras into sensors as well as the incorporation of advanced application functions (integrated audiovisual communications, augmented reality, flexible media playing and recording, etc.), the Cosmos GE enables a more easy Big data analysis over context integrated with popular Big Data platforms (Spark and Flink), the FogFlow GE  is a distributed execution framework to support dynamic processing flows over cloud and edges, while the incubated the Perseo GE introduces Complex Event Processing (CEP) defined using a rules-based system, enabling you to fire events which send HTTP requests, emails, tweets, SMS messages etc., the OpenVidu GE is an abstraction layer for Kurento, making media processing easier to program.

Regarding the Interoperability layer, in order to implement a FIWARE-based solution, a number of FIWARE platform components (GEs) are utilised in an interoperable manner. All interactions between the platform components or applications and the Context Broker take place using the FIWARE NGSI RESTful API open standard. The same APIs (if chosen to be exposed externally) can take the form of an interoperability layer for the interoperation with external platforms or just for data consultation between platforms. However in case that the external platform is not also FIWARE-based, i.e. does not comply to the same FIWARE NGSI data model, an intermediate layer/component may be needed in order to perform the necessary mappings/ translations or any other operations needed for achieving compatibility between the heterogeneous platform APIs.

In the Semantic layer, semantics are supported by FIWARE in terms of data models and APIs implementing them. Data in FIWARE refers to information that is produced, generated, collected or observed that may be relevant for processing, carrying out further analysis and knowledge extraction. In terms of the traditional NGSI v2 FIWARE data model, a cornerstone concept is that data elements are not bound to a specific format representation. Also, the structural definition of Data Elements encloses its Data Type, a number of Data Element attributes (which enclose the following: Name, Type, Value) and, optionally, a set of Metadata Elements also referred to as semantic data (which have also data-like attributes: Name, Type, Value). Lately, the FIWARE NGSI v2 information model has been evolved to better support linked data (entity relationships), property graphs and semantics (exploiting the capabilities offered by JSON-LD). This work has been conducted under the ETSI ISG CIM initiative and has been branded as NGSI-LD. The main constructs of NGSI-LD are Entity, Property and Relationship. NGSI-LD Entities (instances) can be the subject of Properties or Relationships. Properties and Relationships can be the subject of other Properties or Relationships. Thus, in the NGSI-LD information model (and corresponding API) there are no attribute’s metadata, but just “properties of properties” or “properties of relationships”.

FIWARE further provides few GEs related to semantic interoperability, however these do not seem to have been updated to the latest NGSI version. As mentioned above, FIWARE is currently migrating to the NSGI-LD specification to enhance relationships between entities, but currently it is up to the logic of the application to navigate between entity relationships. The IoT Discovery GE acts as a meeting point for IoT Context Producers to register the availability of their Things and Sensor devices, and IoT Context Consumers to discover them, using either the OMA NGSI-9 messaging protocol, or the Sense2Web API that supports Linked Open Data. Also as part of the IoT Broker GE, an IoT Knowledge Server is provided, which contains a large amount of IoT semantic knowledge useful from the perspective of a project. The IoT Knowledge Server is a standalone component created for serving semantic information to the IoT Broker semantic ontologies.

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