Future Sensor Web 

Aim and Scope

The main goal of the Future Sensor Web group is to exchange past and present Sensor Web experiences, report on identified practical as well as theoretical challenges, and to formulate future research areas. The group was initially formed to share material among the participants of the ‘Future Sensor Web and its Applications’ workshop, which took place in Ispra (Italy) at the 28th and 29th of January 2010. This meeting was co-organised by the EEA and the SDI Unit of the JRC. It resulted in a large collection of experiences, challenges, and research areas on practical and theoretic level. We recently decided to open the group to the public in order to widen the discussions.

Proposed work items, including pilots for scalable and robust Sensor Web solutions, closely relate to recent developments on the Future Internet (FI). We formulated our position to FI usage areas and started to promote sensing of our environment in terms of physical devices, simulations of geospatial phenomena, and Volunteered Geospatial Information (VGI). We intend to strengthen this position in the future, especially in terms of innovation and research in the broader Senor Web context.

Research Challenges

Research challenges for establishing a Future Sensor Web are twofold. Practical challenges include standard development, provision of best practices, and awareness rising. The sheer number of involved standards (over 30) highlights complexity of these challenges. We decided to particularly consider the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) group of standards. However, the group currently concentrates on the theoretical challenges, which were categorised as follows (see also Figure 1):

(1)   Specifics of basic components: covering power supply and network coverage for classical physical sensors, encapsulation of models as services, as well as VGI.

(2)   Interoperability in a heterogeneous environment: dealing with resource discovery, processing support, service interfacing, and generic client development.

(3)   Event based architecture: considering asynchronous communication even beyond the web of various sensors in order to enable situation awareness.

(4)   Fusion of observations with uncertainty analysis: involving uncertainty, reliability, trust, but also the economic value of information from source to consumer.

(5)   Automation of the added value chain: considering sensor plug-and-play, loosely-coupled and dynamically generated workflows and streaming.

(6)   Projection of general IT solutions: including digital rights management, user feedback, and augmentation with semantic technologies, such as Linked Data.

(7)   Business models and socio-economic assessment: addressing business models for the adoption, deployment, and maintenance of sensor webs, as well as their assessment in the light of society and policy making.

Figure 1: Categories of theoretical research areas.

Relation to the Future Internet

In the following, we relate our work to the topics that were addressed during the ‘2nd Future Internet PPP and its Usage Areas’ meeting, which as held in Brussels at the 21st and 22nd of June 2010. The meeting was co-organised by the Expanding the European Future Internet Community (EX-FI) Support Action and the European Commission. Five questions were posted prior to the workshop. In a nutshell, we provided the following answers (topic of the question is indicated in italic):

(1)               Large-scale experimentation with the Future Internet should include environmental applications and specifically the integration of sensors into FI.

(2)               Important innovative Internet functionality and technologies are reflected by the seven research areas that are listed above. Here, core issues include a real time view of the world, and extracting knowledge from large amounts of data depending on context. This specifically considers information based on three resource types (physical sensors, environmental models, and citizen).

(3)               Expected functionalities of FI core technology platform include robustness, scalability, and quality of service. We see a clear need for a hybrid Service Oriented and Event Driven Architecture, mechanisms to react to situations, and use of semantic technologies with distributed metadata management.

(4)               Requirements for experimentation and prototyping branch from intense user involvement, over testing and developing existing solutions further, to encompassing the socio-economic and organizational dimensions.

(5)               The potential role of our group in the FI-PPP might be the deployment of the Future Sensor (and Model) Web infrastructure taking existing standards into account and providing required FI core services while re-using existing platform(s).

We further investigate this relation and discuss how we may distinguish between core FI functionalities, specifics of the Sensor Web/environmental area, and cross-usage area trials. We hope to clarify these relations in order to position the Future Sensor Web in the bigger picture and at the same time to define our most valuable contribution(s).

Feel free to contribute! 

If you would like to take an active role in the discussions, please feel free to join the Future Sensor Web group.  Although most of the material on the site is public, please note that you must register as a member of the INSPIRE Forum before you can  join the group and  participate in the discussions. We are looking forward to inspiring discussions and potential collaborations.

future sensor web

Last updated 629 days ago by Karen Fullerton