An Intermediary Layer for Linking Sensor Networks and the Sensor Web

In recent years, the standards of OGC’s Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative have been applied in a multitude of projects to encapsulate heterogeneous geosensors for web-based discovery, tasking and access. Currently, SWE services and the different types of geosensors are integrated manually due to a conceptual gap between these two layers. Pair-wise adapters are created to connect an implementation of a particular SWE service with a particular type of geosensor. This approach is contrary to the aim of reaching interoperability and leads to an extensive integration effort in large scale systems with various types of geosensors and various SWE service implementations. To overcome this gap between geosensor networks and the Sensor Web, this work presents an intermediary layer for integrating these two distinct layers seamlessly. This intermediary layer is called the Sensor Bus as it is based on the message bus architecture pattern. It reduces the effort of connecting a sensor with the SWE services, since only the adaption to the Sensor Bus has to be created. The communication infrastructure which acts as the basis for the Sensor Bus is exchangeable. In this work, the Sensor Bus is based on Twitter. The involved SWE services as well as connected geosensors are represented as user profiles of the Twitter platform. Keywords-ensor Web, geosensor networks, SWE, Twitterensor Web, geosensor networks, SWE, TwitterS