Semantic Sensor Web

Sheth, Henson, Sahoo

semantic web sensor network ontology data fusion knowledge representation

@article{sheth:ieee-ic2008,
  title={Semantic Sensor Web},
  author={Sheth, A. and Henson, C. and Sahoo, S.S.},
  journal={{IEEE} Internet Computing},
  pages={78--83},
  year={2008}
}

Many sensor applications, distributing many different kinds of sensors, across the world

• Meteorology for weather and wildfire detection http://www.met.utah.edu/mesowest
• Traffic management http://www.buckeyetraffic.org
• Satellite imaging for earth and space observation http://vast.uah.edu
• Medical sciences for patient care using biometric sensors http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/109350703322682531
• Homeland security for rad/biochem detection http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8092280

Current standardization efforts

• Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC; http://www.opengeospatial.org)
• Semantic Web
• Sensor Standards Harmonization Working Group (http://semanticcommunity.wikis/Sensor_Standards_and_Data_Harmonization)
• IEEE 1451
• ANSI N42.42
• Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear data model
• Open Geospatial Consortium Sensor Web Enablement (SWE)
  • Observations and Measurements
  • Sensor Model Language
  • Transducer Model Language
  • Sensor Observation Service
  • Sensor Planning Service
  • Sensor Alert Service
  • Web Notification Services
• W3C Geospatial Incubator Group http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/geo/
• OGC Geographic Markup Language Ontology http://loki.cae.drexel.edu/~wbs/ontology/ogc-gml.html
• OWL Time http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/

Internet and World Wide Web oriented infrastructure for "collecting, modeling, storing, retrieving, sharing, manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing information about sensors and sensor observations"

Incorporates tags into the actual XML data via RDFa

Registry of domain-specific ontologies

• Oceanography http://oostethys.org
• Open Biomedical Ontologies at National Center for Biomedical Ontologies http://www.bioontology.org

Several common elements modeled in mid--upper ontologies

• Query by location via coordinate, bounding box, named location
• Time interval semantics

Mentions incorporating rules, but don't place into real framework

• I.e., to take temperature and weather information and infer road conditions

Doesn't really discuss how data is collected, gets queried, but makes clear that it's basically in the context of a centralized database service

Of note:

• Tesseract Open source optical character recognition http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/