Integrated open geospatial web service enabled cyber-physical information infrastructure for precision agriculture monitoring

Various wireless and wired sensors serve vital functions in situational awareness for precision agriculture (PA) monitoring. Achieving the seamless integration of these heterogeneous sensors into information systems to achieve interoperability is challenging. To solve this problem, an integrated open geospatial web service-enabled cyber-physical infrastructure was proposed in this study to acquire, integrate, process, and distribute monitoring information from the physical sensor space of the PA system over the World Wide Web space. This infrastructure was designed as a service-oriented architecture middleware between heterogeneous physical sensors and different PA information clients. In particular, sensor web enablement and web processing services were utilized. Ten types of distributed agricultural sensors were deployed in Baoxie field, Wuhan City, and two different experiments were conducted to verify the proposed cyber-physical infrastructure. Results demonstrated that this infrastructure was capable of handling data and analyses in sensor-based PA monitoring. The proposed approach was then compared with existing typical PA infrastructures. Results indicated that the proposed cyber-physical infrastructure provided interoperable access for heterogeneous sensors, data, and algorithms. The proposed infrastructure thus provides a new feasible method for information system design in PA.