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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."
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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.
for starters, you can talk to this guy
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
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.