A Lightweight Approach for the Sensor Observation Service to Share Environmental Data across Europe

Abstract

The importance of near real-time access to environmental data has increased steadily over the last few years. In this article, the focus is on the European Environment Agency (EEA), which receives environmental data from a large number of providers. The heterogeneous data formats and data transfer mechanisms make the data collection and integration a difficult task for the EEA. An approach is needed for facilitating the interoperable exchange of environmental data on a large scale. A core element of this approach is the Sensor WebEnablement (SWE) technology of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) which allows the standardized, interoperable, vendor and domain independent exchange of sensor data. The main contribution of this article is a lightweight profile for the OGC Sensor Observation Service that ensures the necessary interoperability for seamlessly integrating the environmental data provided by the EEA's member states and thus forms the foundation for the developed data exchange mechanisms. This is complemented by information about the resulting Sensor Web architecture and the integration into the EEA's existing IT infrastructure. In summary,

Development of a spatial decision support system for flood risk management in Brazil that combines volunteered geographic information with wireless sensor networks

“…First, the GetFeature operation is processed at WFS and aims to return a document to the decision-support layer containing a set of available geographic features (OGC, 2014). Second, the GetObservation operation provides access to integrated information by means of the spatial, temporal, and thematic filtering which will be used by the visual indicators (Jirka et al, 2012). This operation needs a set of parameters (see details in OGC, 2012) and its response is based on O&M specifications (OGC, 2011).…”

“…The sensor adapter was developed on this layer using Java Server Pages (JSP) while the volunteered observation service used Java language. The 52north framework 5 was used as an SOS implementation (Jirka et al, 2012). Both databases, sensor and spatial, used PostgreSQL as its database management system and had an extension to the geographic database (PostGIS).…”

Pull-Based Modeling and Algorithms for Real-Time Provision of High-Frequency Sensor Data from Sensor Observation Services

“…First is the Static Policy [17], in which way data are requested covariance matrix of measurement noise, is the transmission matrix to change from the state space to measurement space, is the measurement vector:…”

An Interactive Website for the River Eurajoki

“…The OGC SWE, due to its generic nature, is rather complex and thus it may be difficult to implement considering varying database schemas, and server and client software. Noting this, [8] defined a lightweight SOS profile for facilitating its practical application. The lightweight profile is very similar to the ad hoc profile of this study but it goes beyond ours by including a transactional part for inserting observations and sensors, which in our case can be done but only via separate tools.…”

“…The application scenario of [8] is European-wide sharing of environmental data. Our case study focuses on a single river, which is a part of a river basin.…”