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)

Flexible data input layer architecture (FDILA) for quick-response decision making tools in volatile manufacturing systems

This paper proposes the foundation for a flexible data input management system as a vital part of a generic solution for quick-response decision making. Lack of a comprehensive data input layer between data acquisition and processing systems has been realized and thought of. The proposed FDILA is applicable to a wide variety of volatile manufacturing environments. It provides a generic platform that enables systems designers to define any number of data entry points and types regardless of their make and specifications in a standard fashion. This is achieved by providing a variable definition layer immediately on top of the data acquisition layer and before data pre-processing layer. For proof of concept, National Instruments’ Labview data acquisition software is used to simulate a typical shop floor data acquisition system. The extracted data can then be fed into a data mining module that builds cost modeling functions involving the plant’s Key Performance Factors

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

From Artifacts to Aggregations: Modeling Scientific Life Cycles on the Semantic Web

In the process of scientific research, many information objects are generated, all of which may remain valuable indefinitely. However, artifacts such as instrument data and associated calibration information may have little value in isolation; their meaning is derived from their relationships to each other. Individual artifacts are best represented as components of a life cycle that is specific to a scientific research domain or project. Current cataloging practices do not describe objects at a sufficient level of granularity nor do they offer the globally persistent identifiers necessary to discover and manage scholarly products with World Wide Web standards. The Open Archives Initiative's Object Reuse and Exchange data model (OAI-ORE) meets these requirements. We demonstrate a conceptual implementation of OAI-ORE to represent the scientific life cycles of embedded networked sensor applications in seismology and environmental sciences. By establishing relationships between publications, data, and contextual research information, we illustrate how to obtain a richer and more realistic view of scientific practices. That view can facilitate new forms of scientific research and learning. Our analysis is framed by studies of scientific practices in a large, multi-disciplinary, multi-university science and engineering research center, the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).Comment: 28 pages. To appear in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST

A Structured Hardware/Software Architecture for Embedded Sensor Nodes

Owing to the limited requirement for sensor processing in early networked sensor nodes, embedded software was generally built around the communication stack. Modern sensor nodes have evolved to contain significant on-board functionality in addition to communications, including sensor processing, energy management, actuation and locationing. The embedded software for this functionality, however, is often implemented in the application layer of the communications stack, resulting in an unstructured, top-heavy and complex stack. In this paper, we propose an embedded system architecture to formally specify multiple interfaces on a sensor node. This architecture differs from existing solutions by providing a sensor node with multiple stacks (each stack implements a separate node function), all linked by a shared application layer. This establishes a structured platform for the formal design, specification and implementation of modern sensor and wireless sensor nodes. We describe a practical prototype of an intelligent sensing, energy-aware, sensor node that has been developed using this architecture, implementing stacks for communications, sensing and energy management. The structure and operation of the intelligent sensing and energy management stacks are described in detail. The proposed architecture promotes structured and modular design, allowing for efficient code reuse and being suitable for future generations of sensor nodes featuring interchangeable components