Sensor Web Services Research Articles

Modeling of spatiotemporal data about the environment in GIS

A large number of sensors are used to monitor the environment, and a large volume of spatio-temporal data on epizootic risks and the environment is processed in real time. To date, GIS data models are represented by static models and more modern time models. However, many of the epizootological and environmental data management systems do not meet the requirements of real-time data management. The purpose of the work is to propose, based on the analysis of foreign literature sources, a modern method for managing epizootological and environmental data based on a new GIS model in real time in comparison with the Sensor web service model.Two experiments were conducted in the urban environment and on the territories of livestock farms with different epizootic situations for potential risk management in zoonoses. Real-time monitoring of air quality and real-time monitoring of soil moisture was carried out in Wuhan (China). The circulation of pathogens of zoonoses and sapronoses in the environment, including in the soil, and their preservation in the form of spores and hard-to-cultivate forms, determines the ecological component of emergent epizootics and epidemics with the coverage of new areas. Experimental results have shown that the use of the proposed GIS data model on the Sensor web service platform for managing epizootological/epidemiological and environmental data in real time is reliable and effective.

Promoting Geospatial Service from Information to Knowledge with Spatiotemporal Semantics

With the development of geoscience, users are eager to obtain preferred service from geospatial information intelligently and automatically. However, the information grows rapidly while the service gets more complicated, which makes it difficult to find out the targeted information for an exact service in geospatial issues. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to promote the geospatial service from information to knowledge with spatiotemporal semantics. Both prompted and professional knowledge are further refined to be published as a service. In terms of an exact task, numerous related services are recombined to a service chain under user requirement. Finally, the proposed method is applied to monitor the environment on the Air Quality Index (AQI) and soil moisture (SM) in the Sensor Web service platform, the results of which indicate geospatial knowledge service (GKS) is more efficient to support spatial decision‐making.

An active monitoring method for flood events

Timely and active detecting and monitoring of a flood event are critical for a quick response, effective decision-making and disaster reduction. To achieve the purpose, this paper proposes an active service framework for flood monitoring based on Sensor Web services and an active model for the concrete implementation of the active service framework. The framework consists of two core components—active warning and active planning. The active warning component is based on a publish-subscribe mechanism implemented by the Sensor Event Service. The active planning component employs the Sensor Planning Service to control the execution of the schemes and models and plans the model input data. The active model, called SMDSA, defines the quantitative calculation method for five elements, scheme, model, data, sensor, and auxiliary information, as well as their associations. Experimental monitoring of the Liangzi Lake flood in the summer of 2010 is conducted to test the proposed framework and model. The results show that 1) the proposed active service framework is efficient for timely and automated flood monitoring. 2) The active model, SMDSA, is a quantitative calculation method used to monitor floods from manual intervention to automatic computation. 3) As much preliminary work as possible should be done to take full advantage of the active service framework and the active model.

Automated knowledge discovery and semantic annotation for network and web services

With the rise of the Internet of things, the smart environmental issue is becoming increasingly important. Sensor web is one of the best solutions to this issue and provides the advantages of sensor networks and web services. Ontology web language for services (OWL-S) is an OWL-based web services ontology, which provides the ability to describe the semantics of web services and their capabilities in a formal and machine-processable manner. Moreover, it aids semantic service matching, selection and composition. However, automatically annotating semantic web services is a highly complicated and tedious task. In this study, we propose a methodology to uncover information in the history data and profiles of web services and then semantically annotate them. With the proposed approach, semantic relationships between web services could be extracted via a combination of association rules and input/output matching. Our results show that this hybrid automated knowledge-discovery approach works better than traditional approaches do. We also provide a scenario to explain how the proposed methodology works.

Intelligent Gaurds against Disaster Prepared Smart Environment using MSP430 Microcontroller

Recent years have tremendous advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) implied in infrastructures for disaster management. Sensor networks and web services interoperable provides alert and warning systems at emergencies. Even though people in technically advanced regions remains ill prepared. The broader spectrum of devices and services makes smart and intelligent environment provides comfort and convenience, safety from intruders, and enhancing our environment for disaster preparedness. The standard-based cyber physical devices are the application system that help to minimize loss of lives and damage to property and enables social connectivity but little or nothing to help us to improve our readiness against killer tornados, major earthquakes, and landslides, floods and so on. Such devices and systems performing predict, detect & alert

Provenance Information Representation and Tracking for Remote Sensing Observations in a Sensor Web Enabled Environment

The provenance of observations from a Sensor Web enabled remote sensing application represents a great challenge. There are currently no representations or tracking methods. We propose a provenance method that represents and tracks remote sensing observations in the Sensor Web enabled environment. The representation can be divided into the description model, encoding method, and service implementation. The description model uses a tuple to define four objects (sensor, data, processing, and service) and their relationships at a time point or interval. The encoding method incorporates the description into the Observations & Measurements specification of the Sensor Web. The service implementation addresses the effects of the encoding method on the implementation of Sensor Web services. The tracking method abstracts a common provenance algorithm and four algorithms that track the four objects (sensor, data, processing, and service) in a remote sensing observation application based on the representation. We conducted an experiment on the representation and tracking of provenance information for vegetation condition products, such as the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the Vegetation Condition Index (VCI). Our experiments used raw Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data to produce daily NDVI, weekly NDVI, and weekly VCI for the 48 contiguous states of the United States, for May from 2000 to 2012. We also implemented inverse tracking. We evaluated the time and space requirements of the proposed method in this scenario. Our results show that this technique provides a solution for determining provenance information in remote sensing observations.

A Sensor Web-Enabled Infrastructure for Precision Farming

The use of sensor technologies is standard practice in the domain of precision farming. The variety of vendor-specific sensor systems, control units and processing software has led to increasing efforts in establishing interoperable sensor networks and standardized sensor data infrastructures. This study utilizes open source software and adapts the standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium to introduce a method for the realization of a sensor data infrastructure for precision farming applications. The infrastructure covers the control of sensor systems, the access to sensor data, the transmission of sensor data to web services and the standardized storage of sensor data in a sensor web-enabled server. It permits end users and computer systems to access the sensor data in a well-defined way and to build applications on top of the sensor web services. The infrastructure is scalable to large scenarios, where a multitude of sensor systems and sensor web services are involved. A real-world field trial was set-up to prove the applicability of the infrastructure.

Cyber-physical geographical information service-enabled control of diverse in-situ sensors.

Realization of open online control of diverse in-situ sensors is a challenge. This paper proposes a Cyber-Physical Geographical Information Service-enabled method for control of diverse in-situ sensors, based on location-based instant sensing of sensors, which provides closed-loop feedbacks. The method adopts the concepts and technologies of newly developed cyber-physical systems (CPSs) to combine control with sensing, communication, and computation, takes advantage of geographical information service such as services provided by the Tianditu which is a basic geographic information service platform in China and Sensor Web services to establish geo-sensor applications, and builds well-designed human-machine interfaces (HMIs) to support online and open interactions between human beings and physical sensors through cyberspace. The method was tested with experiments carried out in two geographically distributed scientific experimental fields, Baoxie Sensor Web Experimental Field in Wuhan city and Yemaomian Landslide Monitoring Station in Three Gorges, with three typical sensors chosen as representatives using the prototype system Geospatial Sensor Web Common Service Platform. The results show that the proposed method is an open, online, closed-loop means of control.

Real-time GIS data model and sensor web service platform for environmental data management.

BackgroundEffective environmental data management is meaningful for human health. In the past, environmental data management involved developing a specific environmental data management system, but this method often lacks real-time data retrieving and sharing/interoperating capability. With the development of information technology, a Geospatial Service Web method is proposed that can be employed for environmental data management. The purpose of this study is to determine a method to realize environmental data management under the Geospatial Service Web framework.MethodsA real-time GIS (Geographic Information System) data model and a Sensor Web service platform to realize environmental data management under the Geospatial Service Web framework are proposed in this study. The real-time GIS data model manages real-time data. The Sensor Web service platform is applied to support the realization of the real-time GIS data model based on the Sensor Web technologies.ResultsTo support the realization of the proposed real-time GIS data model, a Sensor Web service platform is implemented. Real-time environmental data, such as meteorological data, air quality data, soil moisture data, soil temperature data, and landslide data, are managed in the Sensor Web service platform. In addition, two use cases of real-time air quality monitoring and real-time soil moisture monitoring based on the real-time GIS data model in the Sensor Web service platform are realized and demonstrated. The total time efficiency of the two experiments is 3.7 s and 9.2 s.ConclusionsThe experimental results show that the method integrating real-time GIS data model and Sensor Web Service Platform is an effective way to manage environmental data under the Geospatial Service Web framework.

An asynchronous Geoprocessing Workflow and its application to an Antarctic ozone monitoring and mapping service

The integration of Sensor Web Enablement services with other Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Services as Geospatial Processing Workflows (GPW) is essential for future Sensor Web application scenarios. With the help of GPW technology, distributed and heterogeneous OGC Web Services can be organized and integrated as compound Web Service applications that can direct complicated earth observation tasks. Under the Sensor Web environment, asynchronous communications between Sensor Web Services are common. We have proposed an asynchronous GPW architecture for the integration of Sensor Web Services into a Web Service Business Process Execution Language workflow technology. We designed a Sensor Information Accessing and Processing workflow, an asynchronous GPW instance, to take an experiment of observing and mapping ozone over Antarctica. Based on our results, our proposed asynchronous workflow method shows the advantages of taking environmental monitoring and mapping tasks.

A ubiquitous sensor network platform for integrating smart devices into the semantic sensor web.

Ongoing Sensor Web developments make a growing amount of heterogeneous sensor data available to smart devices. This is generating an increasing demand for homogeneous mechanisms to access, publish and share real-world information. This paper discusses, first, an architectural solution based on Next Generation Networks: a pilot Telco Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) Platform that embeds several OGC® Sensor Web services. This platform has already been deployed in large scale projects. Second, the USN-Platform is extended to explore a first approach to Semantic Sensor Web principles and technologies, so that smart devices can access Sensor Web data, allowing them also to share richer (semantically interpreted) information. An experimental scenario is presented: a smart car that consumes and produces real-world information which is integrated into the Semantic Sensor Web through a Telco USN-Platform. Performance tests revealed that observation publishing times with our experimental system were well within limits compatible with the adequate operation of smart safety assistance systems in vehicles. On the other hand, response times for complex queries on large repositories may be inappropriate for rapid reaction needs.

A Survey of Sensor Web Services for the Smart Grid

The broad use ofWireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in various fields have resulted in growing demand for advanced data collection and querying mechanisms embedded in the sensor node. Sensor Web Services (SWS) have recently emerged as a promising tool to enable external machines to have access to the information collected by public sensor webs. Machine-to-machine interactions or wireless sensor and actor networks can take advantage of this platform-independent technology to develop diverse smart grid applications. In this survey, we first briefly present the state of the art in SWS technology by describing the techniques for customizing web services to fit the sensor node capabilities such as customizing the WSDL file, compressing XML documents and redesigning TCP protocol. Then, we survey the studies that have utilized the SWS technology in smart grid applications. These studies have shown that SWS provide energy management capabilities to the consumers and the utilities, and they are well suited for smart grid integrated smart home solutions.

Design and Implementation of Geospatial Sensor Web Information Public Service Platform

With the development of earth observation technologies, sensor type and quantity increase massively.In order to manage information and service resources related to Earth Observation Sensor Web efficiently, allow users access and apply these resources comprehensively and accurately, based on Sensor Web information model and service interface specifications, this paper designs and implements geospatial sensor web Information Public Service Platform, namely GeoSensor. GeoSensor is based on a service-oriented architecture, calls and combines sensor registration service, sensor observation service, real-time mapping service, satellite location-based service and other services, gets real-time sensor information, sensor observational data, data product and other information resources and demonstrates these information resources in the Map World with graphics, text, tables, and video vividly. GeoSensor mainly consists of four major functional modules:(i) Sensor Retrieval Module which is mainly used for retrieving motion sensors, in-situ sensors and remote sensors according to the specified filter criteria, such as time, space, subject and other conditions;(ii) Sensor Observational Data Retrieval Module is mainly used according to the specified filter conditions, access to various types of sensor observation data, and show these observational data in Map World in different ways;(iii) Sensor Control Module is mainly used to control in-situ sensors and video sensors, and feedback the result of sensor control based on these changes of the sensor observational data or the access method of sensor observational data; And(iv) Thematic Map Service is to use sensor observation data to generate thematic maps, and the data products generated by this service can reflect the overall situation within a specific area. GeoSensor achieves online search, instant access, network control and real-time mapping and other functions for these resources. In the future, a more powerful sensor web information public service platform with semantics will be build, which could be used in smart city.

WYSIWYG GEOPROCESSING: COUPLING SENSOR WEB AND GEOPROCESSING SERVICES IN VIRTUAL GLOBES

Abstract. We propose to advance the scientific understanding and applications of geospatial data by coupling Sensor Web and Geoprocessing Services in Virtual Globes for higher-education teaching and research. The vision is the concept of "What You See is What You Get" geoprocessing, shortly known as WYSIWYG geoprocessing. Virtual Globes offer tremendous opportunities, such as providing a learning tool to help educational users and researchers digest global-scale geospatial information about the world, and acting as WYSIWYG platforms, where domain experts can see what their fingertips act in an interactive three-dimensional virtual environment. In the meantime, Sensor Web and Web Service technologies make a large amount of Earth observing sensors and geoprocessing functionalities easily accessible to educational users and researchers like their local resources. Coupling Sensor Web and geoprocessing Services in Virtual Globes will bring a virtual learning and research environment to the desktops of students and professors, empowering them with WYSIWYG geoprocessing capabilities. The implementation combines the visualization and communication power of Virtual Globes with the on-demand data collection and analysis functionalities of Sensor Web and geoprocessing services, to help students and researchers investigate various scientific problems in an environment with natural and intuitive user experiences. The work will contribute to the scientific and educational activities of geoinformatic communities in that they will have a platform that are easily accessible and help themselves perceive world space and perform live geoscientific processes.

A HYBRID PULL-PUSH SYSTEM FOR NEAR REAL-TIME NOTIFICATIONS ON SENSOR WEB

Abstract. World-wide sensor web generates tremendous amount of sensor data stream allowing people to observe events that were previously unobservable. Sensor web has been wildly applied in many monitoring systems; some of them are extremely time-sensitive, e.g., disaster management systems. However, with the growing amount of sensor data, the traditional request/response communication model becomes inefficient as it is based on point-to-point pulling interactions between users and data providers. In order to address this issue, publish/subscribe communication model has been proposed and applied in many applications, e.g., web blogging. The publish/subscribe model utilizes an intermediary broker on matching predefined queries with the data pushed to the broker. However, we argue that the publish/subscribe model is hard to be directly applied to sensor web due to the fact that most sensor web services are based on pulling interaction model only. For instance, more and more sensor data providers are publishing their sensor data with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Observation Service (SOS) standards, and the OGC SOS services are based on the request/response model. Therefore, in order to address this issue, we propose a hybrid pull-push system to retrieve sensor web data in a timely manner. The preliminary experimental results indicate that the proposed system is able to fetch near real time sensor streams from pull-based sensor web services.

A Flexible tool for Discovery and Selection of Sensor Web Registry Services with Extended SOA Framework

Sensor Web Services are recently emerged as promising technology and have potential usage in a wide range of application domain. However due to advancement of OGC SWE standard, the discovery and selection of Sensor Web Registry services throughout heterogeneous environment become a challenging task. Many approaches and frameworks have been proposed to discover the sensor web registry services and some of the approaches assume that the requests are placed in SOAP compatible formats while others focus on GUI based parametric query processing. In this paper, a flexible tool has been proposed that uses the Natural Language Query Processing which is a convenient and easy method of sensor data access in comparison to SQL or XML based Query Language like XQuery and XPath. An architecture based on extended SOA Framework that organizes the method of sensor web registry service discovery and selection in an efficient and structured manner has been suggested by adding some new layers like Request Parser & Query Generator (RPQ), Service Verifier and Certifier (SVC) and Service Rank Calculator (SRC). A typical weather sensor web service scenario is considered in this paper for finding the most relevant service according to requester‟s functional and QoS requirements.

RESTFul based heterogeneous Geoprocessing workflow interoperation for Sensor Web Service

Advanced sensors on board satellites offer detailed Earth observations. A workflow is one approach for designing, implementing and constructing a flexible and live link between these sensors' resources and users. It can coordinate, organize and aggregate the distributed sensor Web services to meet the requirement of a complex Earth observation scenario.A RESTFul based workflow interoperation method is proposed to integrate heterogeneous workflows into an interoperable unit. The Atom protocols are applied to describe and manage workflow resources. The XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) workflow standards are applied to structure a workflow that accesses sensor information and one that processes it separately. Then, a scenario for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) from a volcanic eruption is used to investigate the feasibility of the proposed method. The RESTFul based workflows interoperation system can describe, publish, discover, access and coordinate heterogeneous Geoprocessing workflows.

Design and Discovery of Sensor Web Registry Services for Wireless Sensor Network with x-SOA Approach

The application of wireless sensor network is emerging as a new trend in different sphere of modern society. However due to the advancement of SWE, designing & discovering sensor web registry services throughout heterogeneous environments is becoming a challenging task and raises several concerns like performance, reliability, and robustness. Many approaches and frameworks have been proposed to discover the sensor web registry services. Some of the approaches assume that the requests are placed in SOAP compatible formats while others focus on GUI based parametric query processing. We have formulated an approach that uses the Natural Language Query Processing which is a convenient and easy method of data access, especially for casual users who do not understand complicated database query languages such as SQL or XML based Query Language like XQuery and XPath. SOA is the proven technology for designing an efficient Sensor Web Registry by describing various parameters and sensor web services needed. We also propose an architecture based on x-SOA that organizes the method of sensor web registry service discovery in an efficient and structured manner using an intermediary, requester friendly layer called the Request Parser & Query Generator (RPQ) between the service provider and service requester via a service registry. We describe how RPQ facilitates the processing of plain text request query to a most appropriate sensor web service and also an algorithm with implementation for a complete cycle of sensor web registry service discovery.

LiveWeb: A Sensorweb Portal for Sensing the World in Real-Time

A state-of-the-art sensorweb is a global observation system for varied sensory phenomena from the physical world and the cyber world. This paper presents the architecture, design, and application of a sensorweb service portal called the LiveWeb. This portal has been published on the Internet and is used by researchers, students, and also other communities. This system has been used to represent and monitor real-time physical sensor data and cyber activities from ubiquitous sources. LiveWeb meets its goal of providing an efficient and robust sensor information oriented web service, enabled with real-time data representation and notification. Living in the current world with the immense magnitude of information, it is important to keep different communities updated and informed with their context specific data. There are search engines available in the Internet to find relatively static items, but not to observe the events in real-time. In addition, mostly the sensed data and events have meaning only when accompanied with corresponding geographic information. LiveWeb is an effective and efficient sensorweb service, that tries to fulfill the aforementioned requirements. The LiveWeb system consists of three main components: (a) special features of a PHP web application, (b) a Java background processing program, and (c) a database. It is a robust system and is currently running efficiently under the environment of Ubuntu 6.10, Apache 2.0, PHP 5.0, JAVA 1.60, and MySQL 1.6.

Standards-Based Middleware and Tools for Coastal Sensor Web Applications

Coastal buoys and stations provide frequent, high quality marine observations for oceanographic study, weather service, atmospheric, and public safety. There is a great need for sharing the generated data sets to enable timely decision-making across various agencies/institutions. However, this requires tremendous efforts and coordination among different sensor network agencies to come to a shared understanding for disseminating the information in a uniform and standardized way. To address these needs and achieve interoperability, syntactic standardization provides to a certain extent the data description models. In addition, semantic enrichment of the information sources is also required to understand the context of the data. In this paper we adopt standardized data models based on the Open Geospatial Consoritum (OGC) sensor web enablement framework for coastal sensor networks, which facilitates improved information retrieval on a variety of spatio-temporal scales. The semantic enrichment is achieved in terms of conceptualization of selected sensor types and other terminology involved in the coastal domain in the form of Ontologies. A coastal semantic mapping (COSEM-Map) tool developed as a part of this work facilitates the harmonization of different representations. This ontological model is amenable to querying using SPARQL, which is a standardized RDF query language. Further, sensor web services discovery aspects have been addressed by augmenting the Universal Description, discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry with Web Ontology Language for Services (OWL-S) and using a semantic matching algorithm for services discovery. Both web-based and mobile-enabled clients were developed to process syntactic and semantic queries.