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."

Comments

Get ready for some tinfoil hats

[BizidyDizidy]

This is precisely the kind of article that lends itself to conspiracy theory. Typically, I'm skeptical of that kind of reaction, but this is getting a little creepy.

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.

No reliance on a single "tower"

[erpbridge]

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.

Re:Sensory Overload

[stewby18]

These Buzzwords are killing me...

interoperable, intelligent, dynamic, flexible and scalable Arggg.

Just because something is a buzzword doesn't mean that it doesn't have meaning or that it isn't important.

• interoperable - There's going to be a ton of different architectures, software, etc. out there. Unless a system can communicate whith all of them, it can't make use of them.
• intelligent - That's a heck of a lot of data; it's going to have to be processed quite a bit before humans deal with it, or it's useless.
• dynamic - The sensors will be moving around and going on- and off-line all the time. You have to take that into consideration when designing.
• flexible - If it won't be a centrally-controlled deployment, then the ability to do as much of what you want as possible with what is available is very important. Also, see 'dynamic'.
• scalable - There are a heck of a lot of sensors. You can't say "let's have them all communicate directly with one central server." Scalability is perhaps the most important feature of any large, dynamic network.

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.

My $0.02

[mcrbids]

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!