Designing environmental software applications based upon an open sensor service architecture

One of the key issues for the analysis and the management of the environmental status is the integration of information from various sources, being in situ, airborne or space borne sensors or environmental databases. The European Integrated Project SANY has published a specification of the Sensor Service Architecture (SensorSA) enabling large-scale environmental information systems. The SensorSA belongs to the family of service-oriented architectures but has a particular focus on the access, the management, the processing of information and event notifications provided by sensors and sensor networks. It contains sensor-specific services, primarily based upon standards of the Sensor Web Enablement initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium abstracting from the peculiarities of sensors and underlying sensor network technologies. The SensorSA follows a multi-style architectural approach: In addition to remote invocations, it also supports an event-driven and a resource-oriented architectural style. This paper presents the basic architectural concepts, supported sensor network topologies, generic use cases, sensor service types and information models. It concludes with a description of the SERVUS design methodology. The SERVUS design methodology is tailored to the design of geospatial service-oriented architectures and environmental information systems and leverages the idea of a uniform modeling of use cases and capabilities of SensorSA implementations as resources.