Standards-Based Coastal Sensor Web

Coastal buoys and stations provide frequent, high quality marine observations for oceanographic study, weather service, atmospheric and public safety. Sharing of the generated data sets requires tremendous efforts and coordination among the different sensor network agencies to come to a shared understanding and for dissemination in a uniform way. Syntactic standardization provides data description models that are agreed upon by all the stakeholders. In addition, there is a need for semantic enrichment of the information sources which would help to understand the context of the data and helps to resolve the meaning, interpretation or usage of the same or related data. The standardized data models facilitate improved information retrieval on a variety of Spatiotemporal scales. In this paper we describe the mining of these information sources through a Web services based framework. The sensor observation service component of this framework allows operations such as spatial, temporal subsetting, filtering etc. Further, the terminology involved in the coastal domain is being conceptualized in the form of Ontology. The knowledgebase being developed using this ontological model is amenable to querying using SPARQL which is a standardized RDF query language. The knowledge-enabled client being developed will allow to process queries on the coastal sensors networks that goes beyond the prevalent key words based searches.