GeoDADIS: A framework for the development of geographic data acquisition and dissemination servers

The homogeneous access to sensor data in data monitoring and analysis applications is gaining much interest nowadays. To tackle this problem from an application independent perspective, the design and implementation of a framework called GeoDADIS for the development of data acquisition and dissemination servers is discussed in the present paper. Those servers are of common use in monitoring applications as they perform as gateways between decision support and data visualization technologies used in application developments and the heterogeneous collection of protocols and interfaces available in the industrial area for sensor data access. To achieve its objective, the architecture of GeoDADIS consists of: (i) a bottommost data acquisition layer that communicates with sensors, (ii) a middle kernel layer that provides general purpose functionality related to data management and system control and (iii) a topmost external interaction layer that enables the access from applications. The frameworks design does extensive use of the adapter (wrapper) design pattern to ease the incorporation of new data acquisition channels at the data acquisition layer and new data and remote control services in the external interaction layer. This makes GeoDADIS a very flexible and general purpose tool with broad application in many data monitoring domains.