Software service architecture to access weather data using RESTful web services

The field of application where sensors are used is expanding extensively fast. The ease of using these sensors is increasing as much as their variety. Generally, sensors provide information about various aspects of the real world. Sensors are used for gathering environmental information such as changes in temperature, air pressure, water quality. Sensors are also used widely in diagnosing automobiles, traffic patterns, health care and disaster management. The important task is to analyze the large amount of multidimensional data generated by diverse sensors and interoperability among various system which handles such complex data. These sensors are distributed geographically and these sensor networks do not take context information into account due to which they provide heterogeneous interfaces to access the data. To handle these issues we need to give greater importance to the interoperability of the data acquired from heterogeneous and distributed network of sensors. In this paper, we are going to propose an architecture using which the sensor data can be exposed as a service over the web. Our architecture will also take the user location into account in order to provide weather data from the nearest available sensors. We are going to use RESTful web services as it is simple, reliable and easily scalable. We are also going to use a document oriented NoSQL database. This paper also provides a detailed analysis and comparison between RESTful web services and WSDL/SOAP based web services.