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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."
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.
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
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.
Bush?
I think an substantial argument could be easily formulated for Clinton as well.
It wouldn't be possible if global means linking and processing all global information avaible.
Take a look at those huge weather computers, try to measure the impact of maximize their input data, and you'll know what i'm talking about.
But if global means remote access to the information of some specific (small number of) sensors, it's ok.
Don't know what the author was talking about but it seens to be the first one.
Just because something is a buzzword doesn't mean that it doesn't have meaning or that it isn't important.
Sometimes things get to be buzzwords because they actually matter. Horsepower is a buzzword in the car arena, but that doesn't mean that it's not important to look for if you want a truck that will tow heavy things.
I'm a grad student who works in Dr. Tao's research team at GeoICT.
SensorWeb does exist - albeit in an extremely rudimentary form right now. It's a university/academic research initiative at this point, so implementing a 'smaller' version of a sensor web is a reasonable goal at this stage.
The backbone for our SensorWeb is an OGC compliant Geographic Information Services suite, and it's platform independant. While it's still a prototype system, comparing a GIServices based system to a standard RDBMS really doesn't make a lot of sense - would you ask someone with a large amount of diverse data why an RDBMS is an improvement over a generic filing cabinet? I'd only do that if I wanted to make a fool of myself.
A sensor web is all about taking advantage of new spatial and temporal data patterns in realtime and creating dynamic linkages between data sources, not sticking your sensor-based data in some digital vault for analysis some time down the road when its relevance is greatly diminished.
We'll see sensor webs much sooner then people think and the ethical challenges surrounding sensor webs going to be far greater then the technological ones.
SensorWeb Overlords indeed =]
ZOMG.
By the time you waved your hand and killed the butterfly your created two hurricanes. One in the east coast the other in the west.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.