Enabling quality assessment through web services

Emerging technologies in web-based services have enabled the integration of global, interdisciplinary earth observations. These capabilities can provide an unprecedented opportunity to promote the establishment and adoption of standards for the delivery of information about sensor systems which can enable data quality assessment by disparate users. Machine-to-machine harvesting of data can either become a barrier to content (i.e., easy to get data but hard to determine lineage and provenance) or it can promote communication of critical metadata (i.e., easy to get data with fully described sensor and processing systems). In this contribution, we describe how Open-Geospatial Consortium (OGC) frameworks can enable web services with fully-described sensor systems, including processing lineage. Also presented here is an OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) demonstration project describing the processing and sensor system used to measure real-time in situ currents and wave parameters.