Slashdot Mirror
The Smart Sensor Web
Roland Piquepaille writes "As writes Vincent Tao for GEO World, integrating the billions of sensors already present in our environment with the power of the Web will represent 'a revolutionary leap in earth observation.' 'In short, the Sensor Web offers full-dimensional, full-scale and full-phase sensing and monitoring of Earth at all levels: global, regional and local.' The Sensor Web will need to have five characteristics to be successful. It must be interoperable, intelligent, dynamic, flexible and scalable. And the Sensor Web architecture will have four layers: a sensor layer, a communication layer, a location layer and an information layer. When it's here, it will have 'extraordinary significance for science, environmental monitoring, public safety and many other domains of activity.' This summary contains the essential concepts of the original and dense article."
Can we finally kill that damn butterfly and stop these hurricanes?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
if this was an anime, the 5 things it needed would be diffrent teenagers with social/mental problems and they would combine together to create "GLOBAL SENSOR WEB!"
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
interoperable, intelligent, dynamic, flexible and scalable Arggg.
a sensor layer, a communication layer, a location layer and an information layer Ahhhh.
Depending on the properties of sensors, geographic coverage, network access capabilities and, more importantly, domain applications, the physical architecture (i.e., the first three layers) can be very different. The information layer serves as a backbone and shares a commonality. This layer is a gateway to integrate and fuse observations from spatially referenced sensors. It connects widely distributed in-situ sensors and remote sensors over wired or wireless networks. Interoperability becomes a key to enable the information layer's integration capability. Uppercut.
Well it sure Sounds Cool...
I, for one, welcome our new smart sensor overlords.
There are that many X10 webcams out there already?
The real task is to rely on government (or corporate interests?) to not abuse the power that such an in-depth system can provide. Does anyone trust them to do so?
I'm all for the "oh, neat" factor, but it often seems that the people producing such things aren't cognizant enough of ALL of the ramifications.
The safest way to approach lava is to have another person with you and he goes first.
that's a lot of adjectives
it will run on Windows.
despite all of the horror befalling windows users - the govt., esp the military, does not get it.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Technology is just too cool!! I love this stuff. Where do i sign up to put sensors in my area.
FINALLY we can monitor which grocery store auto-doors are open. I'm sure the (insert hated government/trade organization here) will subpoena the hell out of it.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
Exactly what are they monitoring again? Earthquakes? Wind? Ocean temperature...?
Did this paper come from the Whitehouse or the Patriot Act or something like that? Why do we have to have sensors EVERYWHERE?
wow
that's just rabid
Now that we have omnipresent video monitoring, we should have omnipotent speakers installed everywhere in the world. That way, when someone sees something bad on the satellite video, they can yell at the person directly.
Esoteric reference.
These sensors would be good for surveillance.
Put little sensored cameras with radio transmitter onto bomb projectiles shaped like blades of grass to go undetected. The projectiles would hit the ground camera side up and stick in the ground.
Put these sensors onto paths on the Pakistan border of Afghanistan where Bin Laden is presumed(in Pakistan tribe areas).
Then take him out.
Why the fuck did this guy think it was appropriate to blatantly ADVERTISE on slashdot, let alone USING HIS +1 KARMA BONUS!
[I]ntegrating the billions of sensors already present in our environment with the power of the Web will represent 'a revolutionary leap in earth observation.'
. gov
This sounds great!
Please send me more information about how I can use these sensor nets to make a difference!
You can email me at: John.Poindexter@Technically.Not.A.Convicted.Felon
PS, I'm sure my friend John would be interested too! You can email him a prospectus at:
JAshcroft@We.Run.A.Christian.DOJ.gov
PPS, don't worry if you get the email addresses wrong. I've got some friends who monitor almost all email, and I'm sure they'll pass along anything interesting!
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
The web is an excellent example of such technology -- it's no longer exciting, because it has become part of our life.
A lack of excitement online due to the fact that it has become part of our life.
What a fantastically depressing way to start an article, and make me want to read the rest of it! Listening to the weather report on the news is part of my life so it has lost excitement, so therefore I am only mildly interested in a superior weather/earth reporting system?
And once we give the earth a unified encircling virtual nervous system won't it become the biggest terrorist target ever? Imagine automatically triggering the "communication layer" with false sensor information.
shrug
There was a Tawanese movie along these lines, called "So Close". Basically, they could access any camera anywhere, and could use it to provide "eye-in-the-sky" support for hits and get-aways. Oh, and Qi Shu looks hot as usual.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
It looks like Smart Dust.
But why to make such thing global? And i think there isn't computer power to process or store such amount of information.
Stuff like this could be great or scarry.. its just a question of how open such information will be.
I hope atleast some of the environmental stuff is publically accessible, that way I can check the polution levels outside before i leave the comfort of my home!
Or just take the Bush approach and bomb everything into oblivion hoping you hit something...
to many old movies?
I apologize.
This is my sig.
You should be modded:
(Score: -5, oh so not funny anymore)
I see they're being smart, and making a cumulative update forwarding capability in these.
One thing I've always said a cell phone should have is the ability to pick up cell phone broadcast signals to determine which are nearby. Then, in the case of a tower outage, or straying too far away, you would switch over to a peer-to-peer version where your signal would get passed on via other phones to the next nearest tower. Hopefully this functionality would use a low quality, low bandwidth signal, so as not to disrupt other callers on the phones it's passed through.
Of course, this would require a general reworking of the phones firmware between you and the tower, to leave a small gap of bandwidth open at all times for this forwarded traffic. (There's a good 5-10 years of rolling out phones!) The sooner some phones with this capability get rolled out, you'd ahave a slowly expanding infrastructure. However, it would greatly expand coverage area, especially in places that are just outside of the coverage area.
These sensors use something like that to pass on data to the next nearest device with Internet connectivity. Good to see someone was thinking ahead. Just hope that capability doesn't get held back because of a budget cut or "I'm not going to pay for someone else's traffic" NIMBY arguments.
Smart sensors watch YOU!
No, wait. That can't be right. Let me try again.
In Soviet Russia smart sensors didn't EXIST!
No, that doesn't quite seem right either.
Wait, wait, let me try again. I'll get it sooner or later.
KFG
Well, i would say it fits very well the spirit behind the Web: Sharing information/data so that everyone can bennefit from it.
This sounds like a whole lot of vague ideas and nothing concrete. Let go land on Jupiter while we are at it, using a rocket.
the books "Harvest of Stars" and "Fleet of Stars" by Poul Anderson. Humans terraform another planet and colonize it, but the only way they can keep the ecology stable is to hook up a "download" (a human mind downloaded into a computer/robot) into a global sensory network constructed by nano-size robots. Best SciFi books I have ever read.
Will manage this, huh?!
Anne Tomlinson?
She'd better stick with her Cisco routers!
if this sensor web ACTUALLY EXISTED, your software might be of interest for someone who was looking to implement a smaller version of this, or to collect and personally mine captured ata.
But, as it stands, these are ethereal wet dreams. And I'm sure your software could improve many times over by that time.
So, it's a plug, and not even a very useful one at this time.
In fact, I fail to see how it's really that important. Can you explain why your software is an improvement over any other generic RDBMS using time as an index?
Moreover, time is not the only dimension that requires correlation in a geographically large sensor net. Sensors can move, so a query may need to be split over sensors who passed through a region in question. Time, space, value ranges, set membership, these are all important datum selection criterion.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Bush?
I think an substantial argument could be easily formulated for Clinton as well.
Sensors like this have been used since the Vietnam war when acoustic/motion sensors were dropped by aircraft on or near tracks the VC were suspected of using. I suppose they borrowed the idea from the navy with their submarine hunting experiences.
I'm not sure how popular they are now with the trend towards real time feeds from UAV's but a combination of UAV's and dropped sensors would make it very difficult to move about undetected.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
does anyone get the same feeling reading stuff like this that you get when you read writing from like the 1930's that says that we may one day visit the moon?
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Actually, this is what at least some of it runs. And yes, the U.S. military does have a hand in it.
would you like a semi-automatic "bunny" or a sniper "bunny"?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Future: Imagine a volunteer force of 100000000 people trying to find and collect the sensors of the previous generation, which is interfering with a newer generation of the global data collection system.
-- Imperial units must die --
Imagine a beo... nevermind. I'm laughing too hard to make the obvious joke.
Somebody must be smoking some serious crack. It's a sad day when the article is so stupid that it's funnier than the trolls.
The opening paragraph is homage to "Computing for the 21st Century" by Mark Weiser. He is the inventer of the term "Ubiquitous Computing".
"Yes, now there is a god".
From The Answer by Frederick Brown (1954).
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Each front page article must be inspected to gauge its relevance, as there is nothing BUT the front page.
Theoretically my software would be an improvement over a normal RDBMS because it is simpler to use. In an RDBMS, the fundamental construct of storage is a table. In mine, it's a time series. So I get some simplicity out of it. Instead of inserting and deleting rows, you set a particular time range to a value, or, you cut it out. You don't have to have a fixed interval width with each series, although the system does have a facility for bulk updates using a fixed interval width.
You can also associate meta information with each series as a time series. This meta information allows profiles to be queried in aggregrates. So, you can do things create some set of profiles, tag each with a set of attributes, and grab a total profile of all of those attributes. I throw in some sugar for doing time zone conversions.
My radical claim is that the convenience of the syntax and goodies for time series this outweighs a more general purpose RDBMS. I've gone to three jobs in a row where people are creating time series stuff, then aggregating by it, and so, the thought occurred to me that it might be useful to have something that, out of the box, does a bunch of time series stuff, and, eventually, also has graphing and alarming stuff with it too (next major release).
Am I correct? Is this a nutty idea? Maybe not and probably so, but, that's my story and I'm sticking to it!
Overall I think the getting away from full blown rdbms is an idea worth exploring. The whole point of all this middle tier stuff and services a lot of us do is to hide the underlying database implementation from the rest of the system. SO, why can't there be a market for other domain specific databases? Yeah, mine's for better or for worse a closed source system running on the evil o/s, but, the idea of a domain specific database to jump start certain kinds of services is an -idea- that could certainly give Linux more room to grow, and more fronts to attack the organization on.
This is my sig.
... but you wouldn't know that since you apparently only read the front page.
http://sss.www.something.co.uk
sss stands for Smart SenSor
for example if bbc has one, http://sss.www.bbc.co.uk
the url's will become a valuable tool in teaching kindergarten kids the alphabet
Still pretty popular. This project is to create a bunch of little sensors that folks can scatter about. They'll then form a sort of redundant mesh. Don't know much about it, their posters on the wall look pretty neat :).
More Info
but they only do that because people bitch about hearing about 1.0.x releases of software, so they keep that contained in a page where you have to choose to read about it.
science has it too.
But normally, it just goes straight through. And this article is broadly classified enough that they can't relegate to a subdomain if they wanted to.
They don't seem to differentiate between hot and not, even with the ability to subdomain. You know that. We don't have article moderation.
... but you wouldn't know that since you were sucking timothy off every night.
Why did I see this and suddenly think "Hmmm... isn't this a step towards putting the machines in charge - by letting them see everything and linking it all together...?"
Now what did I do with my tin foil beanie?
any global sensor net will need all of this features (and more) implictly.
No need to state the obvious.
A brief overview of the various technologies and protocols which endeavor to tie everything we have together, and lay groundwork for future developments would have been taken less negatively.
It sounds like work is ongoing, according to the article, and the article pointed to by that article, but no leads or pointers to see the progress for yourself are provided.
At least I can get the name of some field experts, so now I'd have to cross-check them against citation indexes.
Whee, fun. I thought slashdot was supposed to minimize the effort needed to learn and play about new, cool, things, instead of copying speculation in blogs and telling me "trust me, its out there".
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Just because you hate [insert person's name here] does not mean that everyone should use new thechnology to kill everyone else they don't like, after all, that is how every single tehcnology in the past, was used to develop "future tech" to kill people they did not like. For instance, guns, dynamite, nukes, lasers, you name it, we will pervert it into said killing machine. After all, all those terrorists did it, why not continue for the next 1000 years doing it again, and again...we will have nanotech soon so everyone can remove somebody they don't like real cheaply too!!
The primary reason Smart Dust wouldn't be a good fit (aside from the relatively high cost of deploying it, compared to using a cheaper, less miniaturized commercial solution) is the power problem. A big challenge for networking researchers involved with this type of sensor net is that each dust "mote" has very limited power reserves, which once consumed are typically not replenishable. (There have been ideas tossed around about recharging by harvesting solar or vibrational energy, but those are just idle speculation at the moment.) This is great for something like a battlefield network, which only needs to be up for the duration of your conflict, but is unsuitable for a persistant network.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
you are incredibly gay. You've punctured your beanie on your hard cock.
And stupid too. Matrix, Skynet: poorly conceived hollywoodisms, just like the fanciful bullshit speculation in the linked articles.
I couldn't get pass all the crap generalisms, and from the quality of this post, neither could you.
Chemical companies are very slowly starting to look at this. It is called MSPC, multivariate statistical process control. Combine all thermometer readings, pumps, heaters, chemical and physico-chemical analyses in one big "understanding" of your process. These models are hower f*cking difficult to validate, and are often sensitive to the error on one sensor. So how are these dudes going to check the accuracy of all their sensors? It will be difficult to spot the butterfly causing the hurricanes if the local sensor is 5 % off due to corrosion.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
1) It's not the "web", it's the "Internet" - unless you plan on making everything a bunch of HTTP servers?
2) Having a video feed, and knowing what the feed is of, are two very different things. Knowing the IP address will only be marginally helpful, especially with DHCP or PPPOE in use in *alot* of cases.
3) So, you have a picture of some guy's bedroom. It's 3 blocks from a commited crime. And...?
4) Also, remember that power corrupts... We need to ensure that the proper checks are in place before we start trusting this technology.
5) Remember TIA? Co-ordinating data from so many disparate sources is much more daunting than it seems, however sexy it sounds.
C'mon!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The folks who "don't get it" are those who ignore the fact that real computer systems operate in the real world. And that in the real world things like the cost of training and the availability of hardware and software matter.
I work on one of the sub projects DARPA funds on that. MIT and Vanderbuilt had a demo on them during the summer. Rutgers had a demo at MobiCom this year. All of it is military funded and no windows insite...I don't think you could convince MS to make an OS that fits in 128K of system RAM anymore
I'm surprised that no one has referenced the localiser concept of Verner Vinge yet. If you want to understand just how powerful this idea can be, for good and ill, I suggest reading some of his books. The capacity for monitoring the environment and providing networked hopping bandwidth is tempered by the capacity for total 27x7x365 big brother. This is an old concept, but no less powerful for it.
It could be a great idea, useful and helpful, However, I suspect that (dons tin foil hat ) the powers that be (read: goverments/large corporations/ your choice of Overlord) will deem it far too unsafe to let the rest of us see whats ACTUALY happening, and will limit full access to those who can be trusted to tell the truth the 'correct' way,.... weapons of mass deception anyone?
Smash every one with a rock.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812 536355/qid=1065428724
"A Deepness in the Sky"
In this prequel to "A Fire Upon the Deep", Vernor Vinge tells us the story of Pham Nuwen and what he did before his journey into the galactic core.
A big part of this story deals with the concept of nanosensor dust that is sprayed into the atmosphere of a space station to create an airborne sensor web for total control of all proceedings in that station. At least that is what the podmaster dictatorship believes. But Pham, who gave the secret of the sensor dust to the podmasters, has other plans.
If you want to read something about the possible or imagined consequences of a sensor web as part of the setting of a truly outstanding science fiction story, this book is for you.
Kristian
I appreciate his work more and more... he was just a little bit early.
-- Multics
At least I can get the name of some field experts, so now I'd have to cross-check them against citation indexes.
Whee, fun. I thought slashdot was supposed to minimize the effort needed to learn and play about new, cool, things, instead of copying speculation in blogs and telling me "trust me, its out there".
Let me know when you find some! I'm researching sensor webs for agricultural use at the moment, and both the IT Journals and the Ag Journals seem to be ignoring the idea.
Horsepower.. it's.. important to look for if you want a truck that will tow heavy things.
It's not important at all. My inline 6-cylinder Jeep will tow more than any V8 regardless of the horsepower because it is designed for high torque and has twice as many gears. It might not go as quickly as a 454 with a turbo but it could pull a tractor-trailer if you could find a way to attach it. I think the fact that you don't even recognize the complete irrelevance of horsepower to your example makes it prime for categorization as a buzzword.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
A sensor web is an exciting prospect, but data accuracy remains important consideration, and "full-dimensional" coverage is doubtful to happen.
As an air pollution dispersion modeler, I frequently use meteorological data collected across the US by the National Weather Service and NCDC. The current array of measurement sites provides an incomplete picture of micrometeorological events (small scale), and of course, the more sensors available the better, right?
Well, the biggest issue I have to deal with is data quality/accuracy. It doesn't seem that accuracy is addressed at all in the article. I guess if you have lots of sensors, you can cross-compare results from sensors not too far apart...
I object though to the claim that any sensor web will provide "full-dimensional" coverage of the earth. In the air, we only know about the upper atmosphere generally through the sparse, limited use of radiosondes (weather balloons that track back results via radio and can also be tracked from the ground with radar to figure out wind speed and direction). Unless we start seeing swarms of self-propelled flying sensors (a'la "Batteries Not Included"), I don't see "full-dimensional" coverage of let alone the atmosphere on the earth. Perhaps the author means "all variables of interest" but the term, "full-dimensional", but it still sounds like an exaggerated claim.
The cost of training is equal regardless of whether you are training MS Office or Open Office.
Software availability - I have found more useful software *for free* for GNU/Linux than I have seen for Windoze.
Linux is cost efficient and has more applications available.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
for starters, you can talk to this guy
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
cause when they use to track everymovement everyone does EVERWHERE in the world.
well, they-can-do-it-COOL! attitude is going to drop real fast.
I like computers, there are just someplaces they should not stick them, especially thoose with recording devices.
"It will run on windows"
at least we know it won't work right
*phew*
and I was getting nervous they might actually trying spying on people without the blue screen of death.
"Linux is cost efficient and has more applications available."
Too true! When all those 1000s of SourceForge projects eventually get out of Alpha/Beta or even "Idea" phase we will be in application heaven! So many text editors and email programs I`ll be like a kid in a candy store!
Laptop Reviews
I don't care to send data like the location of my computer or the temperature outside my window, but this seems a too "amateur" approach to data collect.
For sure *I* don't have enough money to afford a professional weather/pollution/everything else sensor.
So, who pay for sensors? Of course who has the money...
I bet with a Microsoft-driven network to monitor temperature, prudent people starts to wear swimsuits under anoraks.
bush seedling, rock ?
Sensor Webs at NASA has already been discussed here on Slashdot. You might find some info there. The Slashdot article mentions the PCMag link, and the PCMag article has the NASA link.
Another story recently discussed here is Weather Radar Goes Miniature, which discusses a kind of sensor web of mini weather radar stations.
-- Rescate
"..the essential concepts of the original and dense article."
I must be missing something - why does a short (2 page?) article need summarising into a mere 1 and a bit pages.
Mind you - there is always a real piece of work like TinyOS to look at.
ps. TinyOS has some real articles about it - ones with abstracts and long words. Probably needs a summary or two.
There are plenty of tools available already that are beyond beta stage; take Open Office, for example.
Additionally, there are plenty of GNU tools already out there that work.
Alot of people poke linux with a stick, and walk away - instead of trying to really understand the paradigm behind it. In a nutshell, it is about combining a bunch of small powerful tools together to create new functionality. Its about brevity and elegance. Its about automation and multitasking taken beyond anything windoze is capable of - all from the simplicity of the command line.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
The description "The Smart Sensor Web" concentrates on 'plumbing', that is, just getting data. The description is too light on the rest that is needed for real usefulness.
The description appears to fall into an old trap, the promise that with all the data we have 'everything'. Yes, getting the data is usually necessary. However, the data alone is rarely sufficient and, thus, not yet 'everything'. So, we also need (1) dictionary of the data, that is, what data is where (e.g., what Google does for the Web), (2) descriptions of the data, e.g., as in XML, the older OSI CMIS/P ideas, and/or just natural language (the sensor web data will usually not be self-documenting -- there is a challenge here not faced by the Web), (3) what we are going to do with the data (we can't expect just to have humans read it), and (4) what the real and valuable applications are (not the news and entertainment of the Web).
The description did mention "intelligent" and "information layer", but it is here that the crucial issues are for power and value; thus, we need much more than just the simple mention.
Broadly we can compare with the Web -- TCP/IP with HTTP and HTML: The Web mostly presumes that the server is sending to a PC with a human reading a screen. So, the Web got to exploit the ability of humans to read screens.
For sensor webs to yield valuable results, we need some powerful automation of the data, need to replace the human reading a screen. There is value here but also challenges.
A guess: Too soon, we will want more than just 'sensors'. We will also want 'transducers' that let us 'control'. Also, we will need security, etc.
Well, here's 7,000 realtime data points for you.
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt
Those are mostly streamflow sites, but you can also find precipitation, wind data, solar radiation, soil moisture, humidity, pH, and other water quality indicators.
I'm aware of this concept for years. You should all read "A Deepness In The Sky" by Vernor Vinge, an excellent science-fiction book already reviewd by someone at Slashdot. Have fun! ;)
Your crazy my friend.
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