A Semantic Sensor Web for Environmental Decision Support Applications

Abstract

Sensing devices are increasingly being deployed to monitor the physical world around us. One class of application for which sensor data is pertinent is environmental decision support systems, e.g., flood emergency response. For these applications, the sensor readings need to be put in context by integrating them with other sources of data about the surrounding environment. Traditional systems for predicting and detecting floods rely on methods that need significant human resources. In this paper we describe a semantic sensor web architecture for integrating multiple heterogeneous datasets, including live and historic sensor data, databases, and map layers. The architecture provides mechanisms for discovering datasets, defining integrated views over them, continuously receiving data in real-time, and visualising on screen and interacting with the data. Our approach makes extensive use of web service standards for querying and accessing data, and semantic technologies to discover and integrate datasets. We demonstrate the use of our semantic sensor web architecture in the context of a flood response planning web application that uses data from sensor networks monitoring the sea-state around the coast of England.

The SSN Ontology of the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group

“…The ontology is a fundamental ontology in the SemsorGrid4Env project, 20 which aims to build large semantic sensor network applications for environmental management [31,32]. The project deployed APIs for developing web applications and mashups that use the semantics to simplify the configuration and deployment of services.…”

A middleware framework for scalable management of linked streams

“…Its mashup engine enables the user to visually explore and combine sensor data resources in a homogeneous triple-based data model. SemSorGrid4Env [26] also explores semantic annotations to support well-informed interactions among heterogeneous sensor data. Similar to LSM, it uses another Linked Data stream processing engine, called SPARQL stream [27].…”

A Semantically Enabled Service Architecture for Mashups over Streaming and Stored Data

“…The interfaces 11 offered by the web services in our architecture are given in Table 1. A full specification of the services, and the operations they support, can be found in [8]. The service architecture uses, where possible, existing web service standards.…”