Advanced search, visualization and tagging of sensor metadata

As sensors continue to proliferate, the capabilities of effectively querying not only sensor data but also its metadata becomes important in a wide range of applications. This paper demonstrates a search system that utilizes various techniques and tools for querying sensor metadata and visualizing the results. Our system provides an easy-to-use query interface, built upon semantic technologies where users can freely store and query their metadata. Going beyond basic keyword search, the system provides a variety of advanced functionalities tailored for sensor metadata search; ordering search results according to our ranking mechanism based on the PageRank algorithm, recommending pages that contain relevant metadata information to given search conditions, presenting search results using various visualization tools, and offering dynamic hypergraphs and tag clouds of metadata. The system has been running as a real application and its effectiveness has been proved by a number of users.