Abstract
Typically, smart city projects involve complex distributed systems having multiple stakeholders and diverse applications. These applications involve a multitude of sensor and IoT platforms for managing different types of timeseries observations. In many scenarios, timeseries data is the result of specific simulations and is stored in databases and even simple files. To make well-informed decisions, it is essential to have a proper data integration strategy, which must allow working with heterogeneous data sources and platforms in interoperable ways. In this paper, we present a new lightweight web service called InterSensor Service allowing to simply connect to multiple IoT platforms, simulation specific data, databases, and simple files and retrieving their observations without worrying about data storage and the multitude of different APIs. The service encodes these observations “on-the-fly” according to the standardized external interfaces such as the OGC Sensor Observation Service and OGC SensorThings API. In this way, the heterogeneous observations can be analyzed and visualized in a unified way. The service can be deployed not only by the users to connect to different sources but also by providers and stakeholders to simply add further interfaces to their platforms realizing interoperability according to international standards. We have developed a Java-based implementation of the InterSensor Service, which is being offered free as open source software. The service is already being used in smart city projects and one application for the district Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London is shown in this paper.
Highlights
Introduction and MotivationWith the rapidly increasing urban population, it is essential for local governments to efficiently manage the city’s resources, development, and operation
Applications and tools can be developed based on these standards without worrying about what different kinds of sensors they use
Multiple sensors can be attached to these infrastructures and their interfaces will always be common for different applications
Summary
With the rapidly increasing urban population, it is essential for local governments to efficiently manage the city’s resources, development, and operation. Other than OGC SWE, there are several projects such as bIoTope [23], VICINITY [24], BIG IoT [25], and FIWARE [26] (more details in Section 2) dealing with interoperability issues over heterogeneous sensor and IoT devices in the Smart Cities domain Such sensor web infrastructures play an important role in establishing interoperability for heterogeneous sensors and are considered as one of the keys to work in distributed scenarios. Not many standardized sensor web infrastructures yet consider supporting virtual sensors such as information coming from Twitter feeds or simple files In these cases, it is needed to have an intermediate service which can connect to a specific data source and encodes the observations “on-the-fly” according to the standardized interfaces without worrying about the data storage and multitude of data sources (see Figure 2). The last section draws the conclusions about the presented work and outlines the relevant aspects of our future research and development tasks
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