Sensor nets discover search

Abstract

In the world of information discovery there are several major trends which are emerging. These include the fact that the nature of search itself is changing because our information needs are themselves becoming more complex and the data volume is increasing. Other trends are that information is increasingly being aggregated, and that search is now becoming information discovery. In this presentation I address a different kind of information source to the usual media, scientific, leisure, and entertainment information we usually consume, whose availability is now upon us, namely data gathered from sensors. This covers both the physical sensors around us which monitor our environment, our wellbeing and our activities, as well as the online sensors which monitor and track things happening elsewhere in the work and to which we have access. These sensor information sources are noisy, errorsome, unpredictable and dynamic, exactly like both our real and our virtual worlds. Several wide-ranging sensor web applications are used to demonstrate the importance of event processing in managing information discovery from the sensor web