Swiss Experiment: from wireless sensor networks to e-science

The emergence of novel sensing devices and sensor network technologies provides a whole new opportunity for global environmental studies and environment-related decision making. The Swiss Experiment is a newly initiated multidisciplinary project aimed at building a large scale platform, to support field investigations of environmental processes, which is based on new sensor and data management technology. In this talk we will first give an overview of the environmental problems being addressed in the Swiss Experiment and identify opportunities of supporting environmental scientists by recent advances in communications and information systems. We will discuss in particular our approach to support data and information management throughout experimental campaigns. This includes support for distributed data stream management based on Global Sensor Networks, for data warehousing and analysis, for map-based visualizations developed in collaboration with Microsoft's SensorMap team and for information sharing using a WIKI-based and semantics-enabled platform. We will demonstrate our initial results and identify some future challenges towards developing a truly comprehensive information management support for environmental sciences.