O2A: A generic framework for enabling the flow of sensor observations to archives and publications

The increasing number and complexity of research platforms and respective devices and sensors along with heterogeneous project-driven requirements towards satellite communication, sensor monitoring, quality assessment and control, processing, analysis and visualization has recently lead us to build a generic and cost-effective framework (O2A) to enable the flow of sensor observations to archives. O2A is comprised of several extensible and exchangeable components as well as various interoperability services and is meant to offer practical solutions towards supporting the typical scientific workflow ranging from data acquisition activities until the very last data publication activities. The web-based sensor monitoring component built within O2A offers a dashboard-oriented approach for displaying near real-time and delayed-mode sensor output parameters including simultaneous map and diagram viewing. This module allows project administrators and data specialists to monitor individual sensors in near real-time as well as to view the data values within a wished temporal range and/or geographical coverage. Additional examples of O2A components are the AWI-specific SensorML profile and raw data ingest solutions, the various data workspace areas and dispatcher middleware, the GIS infrastructure, and the ticket and data curation system as central hub supporting the final data publication activity. Finally, in the context of the large-scale multi-disciplinary project “Frontiers of Arctic Monitoring” Project (FRAM), we illustrate how the proposed O2A framework will assist scientists in developing enhanced data products and facilitate data re-use in the future.