Progress and Challenges Facing the Semantic Sensor Web for Earth Observation

Abstract

The integration of semantics in the context of the Sensor Web for Earth Observation can achieve a clear and detailed description and consistent expression of resources.Due to the large number of sensors and differing accompanying resources,the semantic technology plays a major role in providing resource discovery and automatic composition as well as machine interpretation in an interoperable way.This article summarizes the developments in the field and outlines the concepts,structure,and functions of the Semantic Sensor Web(SSW).Research on the Sensor Web and the Semantic Web has promoted the growth and rapid development of the SSW.The progress of SSW reflects coherent framework for accessing,sharing,discovering,and managing resources across different applications.Most efforts in this area have focused on the key technologies of the SSW,which could be used to construct sensor-and observation-centric typical ontologies.The integration of semantic technologies into the Sensor Web has proposed as important components of complex,heterogeneous and dynamic information systems.It improves the interoperation of heterogeneous resources and communication protocols,and has developed to address this aim of intelligent expression,discovery and services in the Sensor Web.The Sensor Web for Earth Observation lacks of synergism and cannot meet the diversity requirement of comprehensive and emergency monitoring.Using semantics could solve the problems and provide a large-scale observation,high-efficient distributed information fusion and real-time information service.We point out challenges in the context of the needs of ground-airborne-spaceborne integrated SSW to achieving event awareness,synergy observation,efficiently processing and focusing service.The challenges of SSW can be considered as an evolutionary advancement of interoperation on Sensor Web.Future work needs to focus on a wider and deeper scale to establish a new generation of ontology and framework for the Sensor Web.