Collaborative web-based architecture for real-time monitoring of sensor data

The distribution of real-time GIS (Geographic Information System) data among users is now more important than ever as it becomes increasingly affordable and important for scientific and government agencies to monitor environmental phenomena in real-time. A growing number of sensor networks are being deployed all over the world, but there is a lack of solutions for their effective monitoring. Increasingly, GIS users need access to real-time sensor data from a variety of sources, and the data must be represented in a visually-pleasing way and be easily accessible. In addition, users need to be able to collaborate with each other to share and discuss specific sensor data. The real-time acquisition, analysis, and sharing of sensor data from a large variety of heterogeneous sensor sources is currently difficult due to the lack of a standard architecture to properly represent the dynamic properties of the data and make it readily accessible for collaboration between users. We propose a web-based solution that allows real-time access to sensor data for multi-user web-based collaboration via a publisher/subscriber architecture. We evaluate the proposed architecture by showing how an AJAX-based and a Flash-based web application are able to represent the real-time sensor data within novel collaborative environments.