A heterogeneous sensor web node meta-model for the management of a flood monitoring system

•We propose a heterogeneous sensor web node meta-model.•We define a nine-tuple node information description structure.•We design a node metadata extension mechanism to support discrepant information.•A prototype system GeosensorNodeManager is designed and implemented.•The node meta-model is applied in the management of a flood monitoring system.

A geospatial sensor web can be seen as a complex observation system consisting of distributed nodes with different functions and web-based access interfaces. Because of its heterogeneous characteristic, the precise discovery and efficient allocation of available nodes have become key problems in the field of sensor web resource integrated management. Considering the management requirements of a flood monitoring system, we propose a sensor web heterogeneous node meta-model and discuss the development of five basic metadata components, the design of a nine-tuple node information description structure. A prototype system GeosensorNodeManager is implemented to provide the functions of modeling, querying, and visualizing node resources. For the application scenario of flood monitoring, the flood forecasting task is selected as an example to test the versatility of the proposed node meta-model and the applicability of the formal expression based on the nine-tuple metadata framework. Results show that the proposed meta-model can be used in the modeling of three different types of sensor web nodes with the extension mechanism. By querying and visualizing the sensor web node instances in the Yangtze River basin, the node meta-model provides an effective way for the resource management of a flood monitoring sensor web system. Compared with the typical flood monitoring platform “Sentinel Asia,” the proposed meta-model can offer a succinct description of the system and lay the component model foundation for architecture design.