I DON'T WANT YOUR SCREENSHOTS
I am, (only) by job title, "the big boss".
Which means that every now and then I sit in a progress meeting and someone shows me screenshots. Nice screenshots. Carefully chosen ones. And every time, around the third slide, the same small ungrateful thought turns up: I don't want your screenshots. I want to see the real data.
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN A SOLVED PROBLEM
We have a context broker. We have data pouring into it every day. So this should be easy, no? I come from the world of MQTT and databases, where "look at the data" was solved years ago - you open a client, you see the topics or the tables, you click, you filter, you export, you get on with your life. So I assumed NGSI-LD had its own obvious version of that somewhere. A viewer. Entity types down one side, entities in a table you can sort and filter, and when you click a thing, the actual JSON-LD underneath. Import, export. Nothing fancy. Just a window into the broker, so I could stop bothering my engineers and stop pretending I enjoy typing curl at a context broker near midnight.
Simple. Find it, install it, done.
SO WE WENT ON AN EXPEDITION
We went looking. And reader, it slowly turned into a proper little expedition - packs on backs, off across the ecosystem after the one humble tool that surely, surely already existed.
Here is what we actually found.
- We found brilliant brokers - Orion-LD, Scorpio, Stellio - that speak the standard beautifully and show you nothing, because they are engines, not windows.
- We found a thing literally called the "NGSI Browser", and I got excited for about four minutes - until I noticed it is a WireCloud widget from 2015, built for the old NGSIv2 API, that needs an entire mashup platform to run and does not even reflect changes in real time.
- We found dashboards - Grafana and friends - that you can bend into showing you a chart, if charts were what you wanted, which they were not.
- We found libraries for developers, which is wonderful if you are a developer who was hoping to hold even more code.
- We found smart-city platforms, data publishers, time-series tools. All adjacent. None of them the thing.
THE ONE THING THAT WASN'T THERE
What we did not find, anywhere, was a current, standalone, NGSI-LD-native browser that a normal human can open and just look at their entities. The most basic tool imaginable is either a decade out of date or simply not there.
THE PART SOMEBODY SHOULD SAY OUT LOUD
We have collectively built something genuinely remarkable: an ETSI standard, EU-backed, with serious brokers, shared data models, real deployments in real cities. We built it for machines, and for the people who love the command line - and we quietly forgot everyone else. The analyst. The manager. The boss. The new hire on day two. The people who need to see the data before they will ever trust it.
There is even a peer-reviewed paper that says, in the politest possible academic way, that the NGSI standard barely shows up in everyday analytic tools, and that getting the data out to ordinary humans tends to need specialist IT support. Translation: the data is in there, beautifully structured, and almost nobody can look at it without a developer beside them. Data nobody can see is data nobody believes - which might be a small clue as to why this lovely standard so often stays locked inside the dev team and never reaches the room where the decisions actually get made.
And before anyone feels got at: I include us in this. We also assumed someone must have built it already. We were wrong too.
SO WE BUILT THE WINDOW
ELESCOPIUM - entity types, an entity browser, everything in a table you can sort and filter, and when you click, the real JSON-LD structure and data underneath. Import, export. A window into your broker for the people who would rather never meet curl. (And, because it is 2026, also for the AI agents that increasingly want to read your context too - but that is a story for the next post.)
Here it is. v0.1. Alpha. Draft. MVP. Whatever word lets you forgive the rough edges.
TELL ME I WASN'T THE ONLY ONE
So - thoughts? What did we obviously get wrong? What is the one thing you would need before you would put a viewer like this in front of your own non-technical colleagues? And if you have spent years quietly typing broker queries and resenting every keystroke: tell me. I would genuinely like to know I was not the only one on that expedition.
Wish to know more or book a short consultation? Visit Vela Context Data Hub or reach out directly. Let’s build your next connector together.
Like everything we build under Vela Context Data Hub, Data Space series follow the same rule:
INVEST 20%, GAIN 80%.
Sometimes the simplest improvement - “show me what’s inside” - delivers the biggest value.
DISAGREE, COMMENT, OR WISH TO KNOW MORE?
to be continued...