This site is Europe only at this point, but in terms of serving up map data, it's one of the best that I've seen. Nice vector data streaming, and a whack-load of fast servers on the back end to keep the performace peppy. It's a real web GIS, not some thing that serves up static images.
http://www.map24.com
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.
Slashdot Mirror
This site is Europe only at this point, but in terms of serving up map data, it's one of the best that I've seen. Nice vector data streaming, and a whack-load of fast servers on the back end to keep the performace peppy. It's a real web GIS, not some thing that serves up static images. http://www.map24.com
If you wanted to get really nerdy, you could implement that travelling salesman algorithm with GRASS http://grass.itc.it/
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 =]
Science is a lot like sex. Sometimes something useful comes of it, but that's not the reason we're doing it