SWE bridge: software interface for plug & work instrument integration into marine observation platforms

The integration of sensor systems into marine observation platforms such as gliders, cabled observatories and smart buoys requires a great deal of effort due to the diversity of architectures present in the marine acquisition systems. In the past years important steps have been taken in order to improve both standardization and interoperability, i.e. the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Sensor Web Enablement. This set of standards and protocols provide a well -defined framework to achieve standardized data chains. However a significant gap is still present in the lower -end of the data chain, between the sensor systems and the acquisition platforms. In this work a standard s -based architecture to bridge this gap is proposed in order to achieve plug & work, standardized and interoperable acquisition systems.Award-winningPostprint (published version

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Pervasive Monitoring - An Intelligent Sensor Pod Approach for Standardised Measurement Infrastructures

Geo-sensor networks have traditionally been built up in closed monolithic systems, thus limiting trans-domain usage of real-time measurements. This paper presents the technical infrastructure of a standardised embedded sensing device, which has been developed in the course of the Live Geography approach. The sensor pod implements data provision standards of the Sensor Web Enablement initiative, including an event-based alerting mechanism and location-aware Complex Event Processing functionality for detection of threshold transgression and quality assurance. The goal of this research is that the resultant highly flexible sensing architecture will bring sensor network applications one step further towards the realisation of the vision of a “digital skin for planet earth”. The developed infrastructure can potentially have far-reaching impacts on sensor-based monitoring systems through the deployment of ubiquitous and fine-grained sensor networks. This in turn allows for the straight-forward use of live sensor data in existing spatial decision support systems to enable better-informed decision-making.Seventh Framework Programme (European Commission) (FP7 project GENESIS no. 223996)Austria. Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and TechnologyERA-STAR Regions Project (G2real)Austria. Federal Ministry of Science and Researc

From global observations to local information: The Earth Observation Monitor

Earth Observation (EO) data are available around the globe and can be used for a range of applications. To support scientists and local stakeholders in the usage of information from space, barriers, especially in data processing, need to be reduced. To meet this need, the software framework Earth Observation Monitor provides access and analysis tools for global EO vegetation time-series data based on standard-compliant geo-processing services. Data are automatically downloaded from several data providers, processed, and time-series analysis tools for vegetation analyses extract further information. A web portal and a mobile application have been developed to show the usage of interoperable geospatial web services and to simplify the access and analysis of global EO time-series data. All steps from data download to analysis are automated and provided as operational geo-processing services. Open-source software has been used to develop the services and client applications

MONICA in Hamburg: Towards Large-Scale IoT Deployments in a Smart City

Modern cities and metropolitan areas all over the world face new management challenges in the 21st century primarily due to increasing demands on living standards by the urban population. These challenges range from climate change, pollution, transportation, and citizen engagement, to urban planning, and security threats. The primary goal of a Smart City is to counteract these problems and mitigate their effects by means of modern ICT to improve urban administration and infrastructure. Key ideas are to utilise network communication to inter-connect public authorities; but also to deploy and integrate numerous sensors and actuators throughout the city infrastructure - which is also widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, IoT technologies will be an integral part and key enabler to achieve many objectives of the Smart City vision. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We first examine a number of IoT platforms, technologies and network standards that can help to foster a Smart City environment. Second, we introduce the EU project MONICA which aims for demonstration of large-scale IoT deployments at public, inner-city events and give an overview on its IoT platform architecture. And third, we provide a case-study report on SmartCity activities by the City of Hamburg and provide insights on recent (on-going) field tests of a vertically integrated, end-to-end IoT sensor application.Comment: 6 page

GVSOS: A New Client for OGC SOS Interface Standard

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.The popularity of sensor networks has increased very fast recently. A major problem with these networks is achieving interoperability between different networks which are potentially built using different platforms. OGC’s specifications allow clients to access geospatial data without knowing the details about how this data is gathered or stored. Currently OGC is working on an initiative called Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), for specifying interoperability interfaces and metadata encodings that enable real‐time integration of heterogeneous sensor webs into the information infrastructure. In this work we present the implementation of gvSOS, a new module for the GIS gvSIG to connect to Sensor Observation Services (SOS). The SOS client module allows gvSIG users to interact with SOS servers, displaying the information gathered by sensors in a layer composed by features. We present the detailed software engineering development process followed to build the module. For each step of the process we specify the main obstacles found during the development such as, restrictions of the gvSIG architecture, inaccuracies in the OGC’s specifications, and a set of common problems found in current SOS servers implementations available on the Internet

New Generation Sensor Web Enablement

Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth’s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement

SWE bridge: software interface for plug & work instrument integration into marine observation platforms

7th International Workshop on Marine Technology – Martech Workshop 2016, 26-28 October 2016, Barcelona.-- 2 pages, 2 figuresThe integration of sensor systems into marine observation platforms such as gliders, cabled observatories and smart buoys requires a great deal of effort due to the diversity of architectures present in the marine acquisition systems. In the past years important steps have been taken in order to improve both standardization and interoperability, i.e. the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Sensor Web Enablement. This set of standards and protocols provide a well-defined framework to achieve standardized data chains. However a significant gap is still present in the lower-end of the data chain, between the sensor systems and the acquisition platforms. In this work a standards-based architecture to bridge this gap is proposed in order to achieve plug & work, standardized and interoperable acquisition systemsWe acknowledge the financial support from Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad under contract CGL2013- 42557-R INTMARSIS, the European Union’s NeXOS Project under contract nº 614102 and EMSODEV Project under contract n°676555Peer Reviewe

Discovery Mechanisms for the Sensor Web

This paper addresses the discovery of sensors within the OGC Sensor Web Enablement framework. Whereas services like the OGC Web Map Service or Web Coverage Service are already well supported through catalogue services, the field of sensor networks and the according discovery mechanisms is still a challenge. The focus within this article will be on the use of existing OGC Sensor Web components for realizing a discovery solution. After discussing the requirements for a Sensor Web discovery mechanism, an approach will be presented that was developed within the EU funded project “OSIRIS”. This solution offers mechanisms to search for sensors, exploit basic semantic relationships, harvest sensor metadata and integrate sensor discovery into already existing catalogues