SANY Sensors Anywhere

Catalogue services play an important role for the discovery of resources. Conventional catalogues usually contain meta-information about available data and service resources. A typical user query to a conventional catalogue could include ‘give me all services supporting standard interface x’ or ‘give me all datasets in a specific region, where the responsible party is y’.

A catalogue used for the discovery of sensor related meta-information needs to address additional requirements. Typical queries for such a catalogue differ from the conventional ones. Some examples may be: ‘give me all 'temperature' observations in Austria of May 2009’ or ‘give me all entries supporting a specific sensor type’. Looking at these queries it is clear that additional search criteria and specific meta-information are needed, which reflect the needs from the sensor domain.

SANY addressed these challenges in developing a meta-information schema for the catalogue which follows the Observation and Measurement Model (O&M) from the OGC (Cox). This model is used by Sensor Observation Services, which provide the meta-information necessary to answer the queries above. Besides conventional catalogue resource types (data and service) SANY defined the following new meta-information resource types according to the O&M Model for the catalogue:

• The ‘Feature of Interest’ representing the observation target
  
• The ‘Observed Property’ describing the phenomenon to be observed (e.g. temperature)
  
• The ‘Procedure’ representing a specific sensor, sensor system(s) or algorithm(s) used by a system.