Making the Sensor Observation Service INSPIRE Compliant

The Sensor Observation Service (SOS) [3] provides access to near real-time environmental data, or observations, in a standardized way. Thereby, the SOS offers flexible spatial, temporal, and thematic filtering capabilities that enable clients to query and discover large sources of time series data over the Web. The SOS standard is already in version 2.0 [6] and applied in many projects and organizational infrastructures (see e.g., [4]). The data encoding leveraged by SOS is the Observations & Measurements (O&M) standard, which is been introduced in the INSPIRE data specification through the Guidelines for the use of O&M. O&M data can also be accessed through the Web Feature Service (WFS), which has been incorporated in INSPIRE [2] as an implementation of the INSPIRE Download Service [1]. However, the WFS interface is very generic and not optimized for O&M data access. So, an inclusion of the SOS in the INSPIRE Technical Guidance (TG) is desired. Hence, this work analyses the SOS specification on how it can be enhanced to conform to the implementation rules for INSPIRE download services.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat

Analysis of distributed ledger technologies for industrial manufacturing

In recent years, industrial manufacturing has undergone massive technological changes that embrace digitalization and automation towards the vision of intelligent manufacturing plants. With the aim of maximizing efficiency and profitability in production, an important goal is to enable flexible manufacturing, both, for the customer (desiring more individualized products) and for the manufacturer (to adjust to market demands). Manufacturing-as-a-service can support this through manufacturing plants that are used by different tenants who utilize the machines in the plant, which are offered by different providers. To enable such pay-per-use business models, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a viable option to establish decentralized trust and traceability. Thus, in this paper, we study potential DLT technologies for efficient and intelligent integration of DLT-based solutions in manufacturing environments. We propose a general framework to adapt DLT in manufacturing, and then we introduce the use case of shared manufacturing, which we utilize to study the communication and computation efficiency of selected DLTs in resource-constrained wireless IoT networks

The BIG IoT API: semantically enabling IoT interoperability

Today, internet of things (IoT) platforms offer proprietary interfaces and protocols. To enable interoperable interaction with those platforms we present the generic BIG IoT API that employs a novel approach for self-description and semantic annotation to fully adapt arbitrary IoT platforms. We have deployed this approach for multiple platforms from the mobility domain.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Enabling IoT ecosystems through platform interoperability

Today, the Internet of Things (IoT) comprises vertically oriented platforms for things. Developers who want to use them need to negotiate access individually and adapt to the platform-specific API and information models. Having to perform these actions for each platform often outweighs the possible gains from adapting applications to multiple platforms. This fragmentation of the IoT and the missing interoperability result in high entry barriers for developers and prevent the emergence of broadly accepted IoT ecosystems. The BIG IoT (Bridging the Interoperability Gap of the IoT) project aims to ignite an IoT ecosystem as part of the European Platforms Initiative. As part of the project, researchers have devised an IoT ecosystem architecture. It employs five interoperability patterns that enable cross-platform interoperability and can help establish successful IoT ecosystems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

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