Publication Date
2013
Document Type
Thesis
Committee Members
Amit Sheth (Committee Member), Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan (Advisor), Bin Wang (Committee Member)
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Abstract
With sensors, storage, and bandwidth becoming ever cheaper, there has been a drive recently to make sensor data accessible on the Web. However, because of the vast number of sensors collecting data about our environment, finding relevant sensors on the Web and then interpreting their observations is a non-trivial challenge. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines a web service specification known as the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) that is designed to standardize the way sensors and sensor data are discovered and accessed on the Web. Though this standard goes a long way in providing interoperability between sensor data producers and consumers, it is predicated on the idea that the consuming application is equipped to handle raw sensor data. Sensor data consuming end-points are generally interested in not just the raw data itself, but rather actionable information regarding their environment. The approaches for dealing with this are either to make each individual consuming application smarter or to make the data served to them smarter. This thesis presents an application of the latter approach, which is accomplished by providing a more meaningful representation of sensor data by leveraging semantic web technologies. Specifically, this thesis describes an approach to sensor data modeling, reasoning, discovery, and query over richer semantic data derived from raw sensor descriptions and observations. The artifacts resulting from this research include: - an implementation of an SOS service which hews to both Sensor Web and Semantic Web standards in order to bridge the gap between syntactic and semantic sensor data consumers and that has been proven by use in a number of research applications storing large amounts of data, which serves as - an example of an approach for designing applications which integrate syntactic services over semantic models and allow for interactions with external reasoning systems. As more sensors and observations move online and as the Internet of Things becomes a reality, issues of integration of sensor data into our everyday lives will become important for all of us. The research represented by this thesis explores this problem space and presents an approach to dealing with many of these issues. Going forward, this research may prove a useful elucidation of the design considerations and affordances which can allow low-level sensor and observation data to become the basis for machine processable knowledge of our environment.
Page Count
124
Department or Program
Department of Computer Science
Year Degree Awarded
2013
Copyright
Copyright 2013, some rights reserved. My ETD may be copied and distributed only for non-commercial purposes and may be modified only if the modified version is distributed with these same permissions. All use must give me credit as the original author.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
