Elsevier

Ecological Informatics

Volume 5, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 32-41
Ecological Informatics

Using sensor web protocols for environmental data acquisition and management

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2009.08.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Standard interfaces for data and information access facilitate data management and usability by minimizing the effort required to acquire, catalog and integrate data from a variety of sources. The authors have prototyped several data management and analysis applications using Sensor Web Enablement Services, a suite of service protocols being developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium specifically for handling sensor data in near-real time. This paper provides a brief overview of some of the service protocols and describes how they are used in various sensor web projects involving near-real-time management of sensor data.

Introduction

One of the challenges facing today's Earth system scientist is navigating the ever-increasing amount of sensor data available from a wide variety of in-situ and dynamic environmental sensors. A key aspect of managing these data in near-real time is providing efficient discovery, access and processing of sensor observations. Ideally, scientists should not have to worry about heterogeneous formats, sensors and sources of data. An interoperable system of sensor data would allow scientists to focus on analysis tasks rather than data handling technology. The use of standards can help machines to communicate without human intervention. Providing such standard interfaces to environmental data can minimize the custom software required for management, visualization and analysis of different types of sensors and observations. However, creating standards is challenging. Implementation of new standards in a variety of applications can serve to show where refinements, generalizations and additional features may be desirable.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) suite of Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) specifications, some newly released and others under development, provides standards for data and information acquisition from sensor systems and data repositories. The OGC is an international consortium of industry, academic and government organizations using a voluntary consensus process to collaboratively develop open standards for geospatial data and information services. The OGC's goal for the SWE standards is to enable developers to make all types of sensors and sensor data repositories discoverable, accessible and useable via the Web. The SWE standards framework provides specifications for interfaces, protocols and encodings that are designed to enable implementation of interoperable, service-oriented networks of sensors and applications (Botts et al., 2007).

The authors have implemented several types of SWE services for selected sensor data sources, then combined these services in different ways to develop or prototype a variety of data processing and management applications, including weather forecasting and mission monitoring. This paper describes these efforts to explore the readiness of SWE standards to integrate both Earth observations and forecast model output into new environmental data acquisition, assimilation and management strategies. Section 2 provides an overview of SWE technologies. Section 3 is a survey of several current projects using these technologies, with a more in-depth discussion of the authors' work in this area. A prototype registry for SWE services is presented in Section 4. The remaining sections discuss resources available to help data providers implement SWE protocols, and examine directions for SWE evolution.

Section snippets

Sensor Web Enablement Protocols and Encodings

The Sensor Web Enablement initiative covers many aspects of environmental data acquisition and management, with a variety of service protocols and data encodings including:

  • Sensor Observation Service (SOS), a web service interface for requesting, filtering and retrieving sensor system information and observations.

  • Sensor Planning Service (SPS), a web service interface for requesting user-driven observations or data acquisitions.

  • Sensor Alert Service (SAS), a web service interface for advertising,

Survey of SWE implementations

OGC SWE protocols and encodings are being implemented in a variety of projects worldwide. Some representative projects include:

  • Data from the Hyperion and Advanced Land Imager instruments on NASA's Earth Observing 1 (EO-1; http://eo1.gsfc.nasa.gov/new/sensorWebExp/) satellite are available via Sensor Observation Services. These sensors were linked with the Wildfire sensor on the Ikhana Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and others in a prototype sensor web to deliver wildfire imagery to emergency

Sensor Observation Service registry

A service registry contains information, including descriptions of sensors and their observations, to help users locate data and services to meet their needs. While OGC has done some work in sensor web service registries, this is an open research area. For the sensor web, where sensors may be dynamic, a registry needs to be able to harvest information from the individual sensor services using SWE data and metadata encodings, and cope with metadata changing in real time, such as the location or

SWE resources

A wealth of information on SensorML can be found at http://vast.uah.edu/SensorML/. Resources include examples, software libraries, tools for editing and browsing SensorML documents, and tutorial documents such as the white paper “Creation of Specific SensorML Process Models” (Robin and Botts, 2006) which provides guidance in using SensorML for sensor processing workflows.

A variety of third-party, community resources is also readily available for those wishing to implement these protocols. For

SWE evolution

All SWE encodings and services have now been approved at version 1.0, with the exception of the Sensor Alert Service, whose approval has been affected by modifications to the procedures by which a standard is developed and presented to the technical committee of OGC. Meanwhile, development of version 2.0 of all other SWE specifications has started. Specific enhancements planned for the next version of the various SWE specifications are as follows.

As of January 2009, new versions of Sensor

Conclusions

The technologies described here, which provide standard interfaces to sensor systems, can serve as the basis for a complete near-real-time environmental data management system, including sensor systems, data repositories, and registries of both sensors and observations. Such standard interfaces for data and information access will improve data usability by minimizing the effort required to discover and integrate new data sources into a scientific investigation or decision process. Each of the

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge their colleagues on the SMART and RTMM teams: Rich Blakeslee and Gary Jedlovec of NASA/MSFC, Robbie Hood of NOAA, and Tony Cook, John Hall, and Matt He of UAHuntsville. The authors would also like to thank Shih-Hung Chou and the NASA/MSFC SPoRT Center for assistance in designing the intelligent data-assimilation prototype; Johannes Echterhoff and Jan Torben Heuer of 52°North for insight into the 52°North approach to SWE services and access to the latest SAS

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