The integration, analysis and visualization of sensor data from dispersed wireless sensor network systems using the SWE framework

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been used in numerous applications to remotely gather real-time data on important environmental parameters. There are several projects where WSNs are deployed in different locations and operate independently. Each deployment has its own models, encodings, and services for sensor data, and are integrated with different types of visualization/analysis tools based on in-dividual project requirements. This makes it difucult to reuse these services for other WSN applications. A user/system is impeded by having to learn the models, encodings, and ser-vices of each system, and also must integrate/interoperate data from different data sources. Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) provides a set of standards (web service interfaces and data encoding/model specifications) to make sensor data publicly available on the web. This paper describes how the SWE framework can be extended to integrate disparate WSN sys-tems and to support standardized access to sensor data. The proposed system also introduces a web-based data visualiza-tion and statistical analysis service for data stored in the Sen-sor Observation Service (SOS) by integrating open source technologies. A performance analysis is presented to show that the additional features have minimal impact on the sys-tem. Also some lessons learned through implementing SWE are discussed