Real-time collaborative intelligent services for sensor networks

Sensor networks that distribute real-time GIS (Geographic Information System) data are being deployed across the world more than ever as it becomes increasingly affordable and important for scientific and government agencies to monitor environmental phenomena. As the amount of data sources increases, the lack of services for connecting users to the appropriate sensor networks becomes very apparent. The real-time collection and analysis of data from a large variety of heterogeneous sensor sources is currently difficult due to the lack of a standard architecture to expose the capabilities of a particular sensor network. What is needed is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that allows sensor data to be exposed as collaborative services which are accessible from within a typical web-browser. We propose a solution that allows real-time access to the appropriate sensor network data for multi-user web-based collaboration via a publisher/subscriber architecture. To evaluate the proposed architecture, we show how a AJAX-based and a Flash-based web application are able to gain access to the real-time sensor data services and collaborate on the data in novel ways.