Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Conceptual Architecture and Service-oriented Implementation of a Regional Geoportal for Rice Monitoring

Agricultural monitoring has greatly benefited from the increased availability of a wide variety of remote-sensed satellite imagery, ground-sensed data (e.g., weather station networks) and crop models, delivering a wealth of actionable information to stakeholders to better streamline and improve agricultural practices. Nevertheless, as the degree of sophistication of agriculture monitoring systems increases, significant challenges arise due to the handling and integration of multi-scale data sources to present information to decision-makers in a way which is useful, understandable and user friendly. To address these issues, in this article we present the conceptual architecture and service-oriented implementation of a regional geoportal, specifically focused on rice crop monitoring in order to perform unified monitoring with a supporting system at regional scale. It is capable of storing, processing, managing, serving and visualizing monitoring and generated data products with different granularity and originating from different data sources. Specifically, we focus on data sources and data flow, and their importance for and in relation to different stakeholders. In the context of an EU-funded research project, we present an implementation of the regional geoportal for rice monitoring, which is currently in use in Europe’s three largest rice-producing countries, Italy, Greece and Spain

From ocean sensors to traceable knowledge by harmonizing ocean observing systems

Society is requesting more than ever being better informed on the state and effects of Earth’s changing oceans. This has direct implications on ocean observing systems, including scientific planning and technology. For instance better knowledge implies that data on health, climate and overall dynamics of our oceans have a known level of quality, be up-to-date, be easily discoverable, be easily searchable both in time and space, and be human- and machine-readable in order to generate faster decisions when and where needed. Requirements with respect to spatial regions and scales (seas and ocean basins, from millimeters to hundreds of kilometers), time scope and scales (past, present, future, from microseconds to decades) indeed have direct implications on observing systems’ spatio-temporal sampling capabilities. Possibly high spatial and temporal resolution also means unprecedented amounts of data, communication bandwidth and processing power needs. Technological implications are thus quite substantial and, in this short article, we will try to provide a review of some initiatives of global and local focus that are aiming to respond to at least some of these needs, starting with the application of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) guidelines to ocean observatories. Then we will address real scenarios in real ocean observing facilities, first with the European Seas Observatory Network and the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor Observation (ESONET-EMSO), then two recently associated Spanish initiatives, the Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN) infrastructure and deep sea observatory in the Canary Islands, and the Expandable Seafloor Observatory (OBSEA) shallow water Western-Mediterranean observatory of the Technical University of Catalonia, one of the first real-time ocean observatories implemented with state-of- the-art interoperable concepts, down to the sensor interface.Postprint (published version

Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation

geospatial analytics; social observatory; big earth data; open data; citizen science; open innovation; earth system science; crowdsourced geospatial data; citizen science; science in society; data scienc

Internet of Things in Geospatial Analytics

Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things emerged as a holistic proposal to enable an ecosystem of varied, heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing modern pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth.Comment: Book chapter at the Manual of Digital Earth Book, ISDE, September 2019, Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild and Alessandro Annoni, (Publisher: Springer, Singapore

EXPLAINING THE ROLE OF SERVICE-ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE FOR CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS BY ESTABLISHING LOGICAL LINKS

In the context of the so-called fourth industrial revolution, cyber-physical systems (CPS) build the technological foundation for the increasing digitalisation of our world. Because guidelines to overcome challenges of building such systems (e.g. security concerns, missing know-how, and lack of standards) are scarce, researchers and practitioners alike have begun to analyse the role of the mature paradigm of service-oriented architecture (SOA) in implementing CPS. However, the relationship between SOA and CPS is not entirely understood. To close this gap, we analyse SOA’s role for CPS based on a concept-driven literature review. The analysis of 12 publications that address the interrelation between SOA and CPS yielded four groups of CPS benefits that can be achieved by leveraging SOA. Combining these benefits with architectural layers and SOA’s design principles, we identify logical links that explain the role of SOA for CPS. Future research might concentrate on dominant patterns to scrutinise how a specific benefit can be achieved by leveraging SOA. Designers of CPS can leverage the identified patterns to understand the importance of specific characteristics of SOA to address the unique requirements of their CPS

Geographic Information Systems

One of the main challenges of the 21st century are caused by the large amount of geospatial information through a GIS. Throughout time there have been many attempts to define Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Yet there is no consensus on define it and restrict it to one definition is limited. In the acronym - Geographic Information Systems - the geographic refers to the Earth’s surface and near-surface, therefore, all human production and activity, and non-human are possible patialization in GIS.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the Internet of Things (IoT): Opportunities and Challenges

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), possessing the capacity to comprehend, learn, and execute tasks with human cognitive abilities, engenders significant anticipation and intrigue across scientific, commercial, and societal arenas. This fascination extends particularly to the Internet of Things (IoT), a landscape characterized by the interconnection of countless devices, sensors, and systems, collectively gathering and sharing data to enable intelligent decision-making and automation. This research embarks on an exploration of the opportunities and challenges towards achieving AGI in the context of the IoT. Specifically, it starts by outlining the fundamental principles of IoT and the critical role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in IoT systems. Subsequently, it delves into AGI fundamentals, culminating in the formulation of a conceptual framework for AGI's seamless integration within IoT. The application spectrum for AGI-infused IoT is broad, encompassing domains ranging from smart grids, residential environments, manufacturing, and transportation to environmental monitoring, agriculture, healthcare, and education. However, adapting AGI to resource-constrained IoT settings necessitates dedicated research efforts. Furthermore, the paper addresses constraints imposed by limited computing resources, intricacies associated with large-scale IoT communication, as well as the critical concerns pertaining to security and privacy

Middleware for plug and play integration of heterogeneous sensor resources into the sensor web

The study of global phenomena requires the combination of a considerable amount of data coming from different sources, acquired by different observation platforms and managed by institutions working in different scientific fields. Merging this data to provide extensive and complete data sets to monitor the long-term, global changes of our oceans is a major challenge. The data acquisition and data archival procedures usually vary significantly depending on the acquisition platform. This lack of standardization ultimately leads to information silos, preventing the data to be effectively shared across different scientific communities. In the past years, important steps have been taken in order to improve both standardization and interoperability, such as the Open Geospatial Consortium’s SensorWeb Enablement (SWE) framework. Within this framework, standardized models and interfaces to archive, access and visualize the data from heterogeneous sensor resources have been proposed. However, due to the wide variety of software and hardware architectures presented by marine sensors and marine observation platforms, there is still a lack of uniform procedures to integrate sensors into existing SWE-based data infrastructures. In this work, a framework aimed to enable sensor plug and play integration into existing SWE-based data infrastructures is presented. First, an analysis of the operations required to automatically identify, configure and operate a sensor are analysed. Then, the metadata required for these operations is structured in a standard way. Afterwards, a modular, plug and play, SWE-based acquisition chain is proposed. Finally different use cases for this framework are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The digitization of agricultural industry – a systematic literature review on agriculture 4.0

Agriculture is considered one of the most important sectors that play a strategic role in ensuring food security. However, with the increasing world's population, agri-food demands are growing — posing the need to switch from traditional agricultural methods to smart agriculture practices, also known as agriculture 4.0. To fully benefit from the potential of agriculture 4.0, it is significant to understand and address the problems and challenges associated with it. This study, therefore, aims to contribute to the development of agriculture 4.0 by investigating the emerging trends of digital technologies in the agricultural industry. For this purpose, a systematic literature review based on Protocol of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses is conducted to analyse the scientific literature related to crop farming published in the last decade. After applying the protocol, 148 papers were selected and the extent of digital technologies adoption in agriculture was examined in the context of service type, technology readiness level, and farm type. The results have shown that digital technologies such as autonomous robotic systems, internet of things, and machine learning are significantly explored and open-air farms are frequently considered in research studies (69%), contrary to indoor farms (31%). Moreover, it is observed that most use cases are still in the prototypical phase. Finally, potential roadblocks to the digitization of the agriculture sector were identified and classified at technical and socio-economic levels. This comprehensive review results in providing useful information on the current status of digital technologies in agriculture along with prospective future opportunities