Congratulations to Tom O’Reilly (MBARI), the editor of the PUCK standard! Today, the OGC membership has voted to adopt the OGC PUCK Protocol Standard.

PUCK enables the standardized retrieval of metadata about a sensor instrument. It standardizes commands to retrieve this metadata directly from the instrument. Therefore, the simple PUCK protocol is added to a sensor instrument’s native protocol. PUCK has already been implemented by several sensor manufacturers.

At 52°North, we were able to contribute the Sensor Interface Descriptor (SID) concept to the PUCK specification. The SID specification [1] is based on SensorML and allows the declarative description of the protocol of a sensor instrument. By providing a well-defined model for such descriptions, SID can replace proprietary driver software needed to run a sensor instrument. In combination with PUCK, SIDs can be directly stored on the instrument. Having this self-description of an instrument’s protocol stored on and retrievable from the instrument itself enables sensor plug & play.

For more information on this please see this blog post as well as this one. Also, the publications [2] and [3] give further information.

[1] Bröring, A. & S. Below (2010): Sensor Interface Descriptors. OGC Discussion Paper. Open Geospatial Consortium. OGC 10-134. [final] [slides]

[2] Joaquin del Rio, Daniel Mihai Toma, Thomas C. O’Reilly, Arne Bröring, Antoni Manuel, Kent L. Headley & Duane Edgington (2011): Interoperable Data Management and Instrument Control Experiences at OBSEA. IEEE Oceans 2011. 6.-9. June 2011. Santander, Spain. pp. 1-4. [final]

[3] Daniel Mihai Toma, Tom O’Reilly, Joaquin del Rio, Kent Headley, Antoni Manuel & Arne Bröring, Duane Edgington (2011): Smart Sensors for Interoperable Smart Ocean Environment. IEEE Oceans 2011. 6.-9. June 2011. Santander, Spain. pp. 1-4. [final]

Ifgi recently hosted Münster’s first HackDay to promote contributions to the nationwide “Apps4DE” competition. Between 40 and 60 hackers and thinkers from Münster met throughout the day to discuss “open data” and come up with ideas for Apps which demonstrate the use of public sector information. An opening presentation by Albert Remke was followed by a series of lightening talks about linked science, linked open data, map Apps and Augmented Reality. After several hours of brainstorming and hacking in small groups, the participants presented resulting ideas and small prototypes such as:

• Family and Recreation App
• App for Open Sensor Data
• Linked open data applications for the Bundestag  members and their private activities in the market economy

Several participants also announced that they plan to submit their idea or App as a proposal to the “Apps4DE” competition. In the eyes of the particpants, the Münster HackDay – one in a series of Hackdays promoted by the Open Knowledge Foundation – proved to be a highly successful event!

Organisers: Geonetzwerk Münsterland, 52N, ifgi, con terra, Open Knowledge Foundation

At the Internet of Things workshop of the OGC TC meeting in Brussels, we presented the SenseBox project which we are conducting together with the SWSL group at the Institute for Geoinformatics of the Uni Münster.
Besides demonstrating the SenseBox project, we gave recommendations for bringing the Internet (or better Web) of Things field together with the standardization efforts at OGC. Standardized REST APIs for things as well as well-defined JSON encodings for exchanging data about / from things could be an interesting contribution of the OGC to this emerging technology field. Similar suggestions were made by other particiapnts. E.g., Ben Pirt from the Internet of Things platform pachube announced their interest in OGC and standardized protocols for the Internet of Things.

Please find below the presented slides.

At the OGC TC meeting which took place this week in Brussels, our new SOS extension for the GeoServices REST API was presented. This extension, which is based on ArcGIS Server 10.1, embeds the functionality of a Sensor Observation Service (SOS) into the GeoServices REST API. The GeoServices REST API is currently making its way through the OGC standardization process.

The implementation of the SOS extension for the GeoServices REST API based on ArcGIS Server is developed for a project with the European Environment Agency (EEA). With the help of this software, the provision of Europe’s environmental data shall be facilitated – accessing data such as Ozone, noise, or water quality will become easier in future.

Please find below the presentation hold at the OGC TC meeting. The slides introduce to the project with EEA and the SOS extension.

Being at the FOSS4G conference in Denver, I just hold a presentation about our Thin SWE Client for the OGC Sensor Observation Service. The functionality of the client is focused on the display of time series data. This comprises a diagram view with comfortable navigation mechanisms (e.g. an overview time series, panning, zooming, etc.). In addition a table view showing all measured values belonging to a selected time series, as well as a map overview for displaying the sensor locations are included. This display functionality is complemented by further features like an export function (CSV, XLS and PDF export) and comfortable menus that help users to select the data they are interested in.

Besides giving the presentation (please find it below), I demonstrated the software successfully If you are keen to see the application in action yourself, please visit our demo deployment.