A Review of the Enviro-Net Project

Ecosystems monitoring is essential to properly understand their development and the effects of events, both climatological and anthropological in nature. The amount of data used in these assessments is increasing at very high rates. This is due to increasing availability of sensing systems and the development of new techniques to analyze sensor data. The Enviro-Net Project encompasses several of such sensor system deployments across five countries in the Americas. These deployments use a few different ground-based sensor systems, installed at different heights monitoring the conditions in tropical dry forests over long periods of time. This paper presents our experience in deploying and maintaining these systems, retrieving and pre-processing the data, and describes the Web portal developed to help with data management, visualization and analysis.Comment: v2: 29 pages, 5 figures, reflects changes addressing reviewers' comments v1: 38 pages, 8 figure

Sensornet checkpointing: enabling repeatability in testbeds and realism in simulations

When developing sensor network applications, the shift from simulation to testbed causes application failures, resulting in additional time-consuming iterations between simulation and testbed. We propose transferring sensor network checkpoints between simulation and testbed to reduce the gap between simulation and testbed. Sensornet checkpointing combines the best of both simulation and testbeds: the nonintrusiveness and repeatability of simulation, and the realism of testbeds

Estimating Fire Weather Indices via Semantic Reasoning over Wireless Sensor Network Data Streams

Wildfires are frequent, devastating events in Australia that regularly cause significant loss of life and widespread property damage. Fire weather indices are a widely-adopted method for measuring fire danger and they play a significant role in issuing bushfire warnings and in anticipating demand for bushfire management resources. Existing systems that calculate fire weather indices are limited due to low spatial and temporal resolution. Localized wireless sensor networks, on the other hand, gather continuous sensor data measuring variables such as air temperature, relative humidity, rainfall and wind speed at high resolutions. However, using wireless sensor networks to estimate fire weather indices is a challenge due to data quality issues, lack of standard data formats and lack of agreement on thresholds and methods for calculating fire weather indices. Within the scope of this paper, we propose a standardized approach to calculating Fire Weather Indices (a.k.a. fire danger ratings) and overcome a number of the challenges by applying Semantic Web Technologies to the processing of data streams from a wireless sensor network deployed in the Springbrook region of South East Queensland. This paper describes the underlying ontologies, the semantic reasoning and the Semantic Fire Weather Index (SFWI) system that we have developed to enable domain experts to specify and adapt rules for calculating Fire Weather Indices. We also describe the Web-based mapping interface that we have developed, that enables users to improve their understanding of how fire weather indices vary over time within a particular region.Finally, we discuss our evaluation results that indicate that the proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of accuracy, precision and query performance.Comment: 20pages, 12 figure

Knowledge Discovery in the SCADA Databases Used for the Municipal Power Supply System

This scientific paper delves into the problems related to the develop-ment of intellectual data analysis system that could support decision making to manage municipal power supply services. The management problems of mu-nicipal power supply system have been specified taking into consideration modern tendencies shown by new technologies that allow for an increase in the energy efficiency. The analysis findings of the system problems related to the integrated computer-aided control of the power supply for the city have been given. The consideration was given to the hierarchy-level management decom-position model. The objective task targeted at an increase in the energy effi-ciency to minimize expenditures and energy losses during the generation and transportation of energy carriers to the Consumer, the optimization of power consumption at the prescribed level of the reliability of pipelines and networks and the satisfaction of Consumers has been defined. To optimize the support of the decision making a new approach to the monitoring of engineering systems and technological processes related to the energy consumption and transporta-tion using the technologies of geospatial analysis and Knowledge Discovery in databases (KDD) has been proposed. The data acquisition for analytical prob-lems is realized in the wireless heterogeneous medium, which includes soft-touch VPN segments of ZigBee technology realizing the 6LoWPAN standard over the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and also the segments of the networks of cellu-lar communications. JBoss Application Server is used as a server-based plat-form for the operation of the tools used for the retrieval of data collected from sensor nodes, PLC and energy consumption record devices. The KDD tools are developed using Java Enterprise Edition platform and Spring and ORM Hiber-nate technologies

Smart Computing and Sensing Technologies for Animal Welfare: A Systematic Review

Animals play a profoundly important and intricate role in our lives today. Dogs have been human companions for thousands of years, but they now work closely with us to assist the disabled, and in combat and search and rescue situations. Farm animals are a critical part of the global food supply chain, and there is increasing consumer interest in organically fed and humanely raised livestock, and how it impacts our health and environmental footprint. Wild animals are threatened with extinction by human induced factors, and shrinking and compromised habitat. This review sets the goal to systematically survey the existing literature in smart computing and sensing technologies for domestic, farm and wild animal welfare. We use the notion of \emph{animal welfare} in broad terms, to review the technologies for assessing whether animals are healthy, free of pain and suffering, and also positively stimulated in their environment. Also the notion of \emph{smart computing and sensing} is used in broad terms, to refer to computing and sensing systems that are not isolated but interconnected with communication networks, and capable of remote data collection, processing, exchange and analysis. We review smart technologies for domestic animals, indoor and outdoor animal farming, as well as animals in the wild and zoos. The findings of this review are expected to motivate future research and contribute to data, information and communication management as well as policy for animal welfare