Interoperability enhancement of IoT devices using open web standards in a smart farming use case

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesSince its rst appearance the Internet of Things has been subject to constant evolution, development and change. Now it has stepped out of its infancy with billions of devices embedded in the world wide web. However, IoT providers mostly de ne their own data formats and protocols and there is still a lack of a common standard that connects these devices in an interoperable manner. There are several organisations dedicated to developing common standards for IoT devices and research is focusing on de ning an e ective standard to be used by embedded devices. Unsurprisingly, IoT has also found its way into the spatial web and into environmental monitoring and sensing platforms connected over the web by wireless sensor networks are now a common way to monitor natural phenomena. This study compares three open Web Standards in the use case of SEnviro for Agriculture, a full stack IoT for monitoring vineyards. The interoperability potential of the OGC's Sensor Observation Service and SensorThings API are evaluated by integrating Web Standard implementations for each standard and contrasting their qualitative and quantitative traits. In a further step the Mozilla Corporation's Web Thing API was implemented and evaluated in an environmental monitoring and Smart Farming context. The results of the study show that the SensorThings API proves to be the most adequate Web Standard for SEnviro and IoT applications for environmental monitoring and Smart Farming in terms of interoperability. It outperforms the contesting Web Standards in terms of exibility and scalability, which strongly impacts on developer and user experience

Modern Information Systems

The development of modern information systems is a demanding task. New technologies and tools are designed, implemented and presented in the market on a daily bases. User needs change dramatically fast and the IT industry copes to reach the level of efficiency and adaptability for its systems in order to be competitive and up-to-date. Thus, the realization of modern information systems with great characteristics and functionalities implemented for specific areas of interest is a fact of our modern and demanding digital society and this is the main scope of this book. Therefore, this book aims to present a number of innovative and recently developed information systems. It is titled "Modern Information Systems" and includes 8 chapters. This book may assist researchers on studying the innovative functions of modern systems in various areas like health, telematics, knowledge management, etc. It can also assist young students in capturing the new research tendencies of the information systems' development

The Colour of Ocean Data: International Symposium on oceanographic data and information management, with special attention to biological data. Brussels, Belgium, 25-27 November 2002: book of abstracts

Ocean data management plays a crucial role in global as well as local matters. The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission -with its network of National Oceanographic Data Centres- and the International Council of Scientific Unions- with its World Data Centres- have played a major catalysing role in establishing the existing ocean data management practices. No one can think of data management without thinking of information technology. New developments in computer hard- and software force us to continually rethink the way we manage ocean data. One of the major challenges in this is to try and close the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and to assist scientists in less fortunate countries to manage oceanographic data flows in a suitable and timely fashion. So far major emphasis has been on the standardisation and exchange of physical oceanographic data in open ocean conditions. But the colour of the ocean data is changing. The ‘blue’ ocean sciences get increasingly interested in including geological, chemical and biological data. Moreover the shallow sea areas get more and more attention as highly productive biological areas that need to be seen in close association with the deep seas. How to fill in the gap of widely accepted standards for data structures that can serve the deep ‘blue’ and the shallow ‘green’ biological data management is a major issue that has to be addressed. And there is more: data has to be turned into information. In the context of ocean data management, scientists, data managers and decision makers are all very much dependent on each other. Decision makers will stimulate research topics with policy priority and hence guide researchers. Scientists need to provide data managers with reliable and first quality controlled data in such a way that the latter can translate and make them available for the decision makers. But do they speak the same ‘language’? Are they happy with the access they have to the data? And if not, can they learn from each other’s expectations and experience? The objective of this symposium is to harmonize ocean colours and languages and create a forum for data managers, scientists and decision makers with a major interest in oceanography, and open to everyone interested in ocean data management

Advanced Location-Based Technologies and Services

Since the publication of the first edition in 2004, advances in mobile devices, positioning sensors, WiFi fingerprinting, and wireless communications, among others, have paved the way for developing new and advanced location-based services (LBSs). This second edition provides up-to-date information on LBSs, including WiFi fingerprinting, mobile computing, geospatial clouds, geospatial data mining, location privacy, and location-based social networking. It also includes new chapters on application areas such as LBSs for public health, indoor navigation, and advertising. In addition, the chapter on remote sensing has been revised to address advancements

A real time urban sustainability assessment framework for the smart city paradigm

Cities have proven to be a great source of concerns on their impact on the world environment and ecosystem. The objective, in a context where environmental concerns are growing rapidly, is no longer to develop liveable cities but to develop sustainable and responsive cities. This study investigates the currently available urban sustainability assessment (USA) schemes and outlines the main issues that the field is facing. After an extensive literature review, the author advocates for a scheme that would dynamically capture urban areas sustainability insights during their operation, a more user-centred and transparent scheme. The methodological approach has enabled the construction of a solid expertise on urban sustainability indicators, the essential role of the smart city and the Internet of Thing for a real-time key performance indicators determination and assessment, and technical and organisational challenges that such solution would encounter. Key domains such as sensing networks, remote sensing and GIS technologies, BIM technologies, Statistical databases and Open Governmental data platform, crowdsourcing and data mining that could support a real-time urban sustainability assessment have been studied. Additionally, the use of semantic web technologies has been investigated as a mean to deal with sources heterogeneity from diverse data structures and their interoperability. An USA ontology has been designed, integrating existing ontologies such as SSN, ifcOWL, cityGML and geoSPARQL. A web application back-end has then been built around this ontology. The application backbone is an Ontology-Based Data Access where a Relational Database is mapped to the USA ontology, enabling to link sensors data to pieces of information on the urban environment. Overall, this study has contributed to the body of knowledge by introducing an Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) approach to support real-time urban sustainability assessment leveraging sensors networks. It addresses both technical and organisational challenges that the smart systems domain is facing and is believed to be a valuable approach in the upcoming smart city paradigm. The solution proposed to tackle the research questions still faces some limitations such as a limited validation of the USA scheme, the OBDA limited intelligence, an improvable BIM and cityGML models conversion to RDF or the lack of user interface. Future work should be carried out to overcome those limitations and to provide stakeholders a high-hand service