title: New generation Sensor Web Enablement.
abstract: Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth's environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward. A coherent infrastructure is needed to treat sensors in an interoperable, platform-independent and uniform way. The concept of the Sensor Web reflects such a kind of infrastructure for sharing, finding, and accessing sensors and their data across different applications. It hides the heterogeneous sensor hardware and communication protocols from the applications built on top of it. The Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium standardizes web service interfaces and data encodings which can be used as building blocks for a Sensor Web. This article illustrates and analyzes the recent developments of the new generation of the Sensor Web Enablement specification framework. Further, we relate the Sensor Web to other emerging concepts such as the Web of Things and point out challenges and resulting future work topics for research on Sensor Web Enablement.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Weseler Strasse 253, 48151 Muenster, Germany. arneb@uni-muenster.de
authors.forename: Arne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bröring
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Echterhoff
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Jirka
authors.forename: Ingo
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Simonis
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Everding
authors.forename: Christoph
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Stasch
authors.forename: Steve
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Liang
authors.forename: Rob
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lemmens
mesh_terms: D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000295:instrumentation*; D058998:Remote Sensing Technology / Q000295:instrumentation*