PULSENet™: An implementation of Sensor Web standards

The OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards provide a foundation for the interoperability needed to enable and sustain the sensor web. A critical step in the adoption and success of web standards, in general, is their implementation in a variety of application and user contexts. This paper discusses the sensor web framework PULSENettrade and lessons learned in implementing an OGC SWE-based architecture. The objective of PULSENettrade is to provide a standards-based framework for the discovery, access, use and control of heterogeneous sensors, their metadata, and their observation data. A combination of open-source SWE code, COTS products, and custom development were required to construct the framework that provided an adaptive and flexible environment for integrating sensors without requiring its users to necessarily understand and be exposed to the OGC SWE standards. To date, PULSENettrade has been applied to a wide range of applications spanning the environmental and defense and intelligence domains. An important aspect of these applications is the need to accommodate both legacy and non-SWE standards based sensors in SWE-based architectures. Implementation of OGC SWE by sensor manufacturers has been limited and substantial effort is ongoing in harmonizing OGC SWE with other sensor related standards. This paper offers examples of integrating sensors that provide only vendor-specific interfaces, related standard interfaces (e.g., IEEE 1451 and CCSI), and OGC SWE interfaces. PULSENettrade is not intended to be a centralized, stand-alone sensor web system but is designed to serve an intermediary role with other sensor, processing and decision support systems. The sensor data in PULSENettrade can be made available to other ldquodown streamrdquo components in workflows, such as processing services or existing data analysis and exploitation systems.