WASP: An innovative sensor observation service with web-/GIS-based architecture

Geographic information system (GIS) can locate, manages, and presents data or location by coordinate information. GIS based applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries, analyze and show the spatial information on maps. On the other hand, wireless sensor network (WSN) is widely used. There are huge amount of data retrieved by sensors sent to the server for query by users. The raw data are usually hard to be understood by users. If the raw data can be transferred into add-on valued data and shown on the Web pages, the user can obtain more useful and realizable information. This paper proposed an innovated sensor observation service with Web based and GIS based architecture, which is named WSN application service platform (WASP). WASP is a data management center, which designed with the concept of services oriented application (SOA) as a cloud service. WASP is the combination of Internet/Web based services and components, database systems, users, and WSN communities. The main goal of WASP is providing an easy and straightforward mechanism of data presentation for users. Users can query and obtain the valuable information and realize the meanings of these data through Web based interfaces, which is defined in sensor web enablement (SWE) by open geospatial consortium (OGC). In WASP, all sensors provide their location information to data center and form a community. WASP provides remote control functions for WSN to increase the data retrieval efficiency based on OGC SWE sensor observation service (SOS), sensor planning service (SPS), and sensor alert service (SAS). We demonstrated two applications using WASP in Taiwan. The WASP architecture is a helpful and efficient tool for user to construct a sensor observation service.