Open source REST services for environmental sensor networking

The greatest challenge in the implementation of environmental sensing networks is converting a large variety of data streams from diverse sensors, often in proprietary protocols, to international standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) XML tagging and web service standards. Implementing standards throughout the architecture will not only enable interoperability and reduce cost but will allow scientists to contribute to sensor network innovation. This article introduces open source Representational State Transfer (REST) services created specifically for environmental monitoring. OGC standards are suggested to help guide future community development for sensor description and registration. This article contributes to the design and implementation of affordable, self-documenting, near-real-time geospatial sensor webs for environmental monitoring using international standards.