Last week, Jordi Guimet  from IDEC, Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya, invited 52°North team members Simon Jirka and Daniel Nüst to hold a workshop on OGC Sensor Web Enablement Initiative (SWE) Technologies in the context of the Smart Cities Expo in Barcelona. The event took place in a stunning tower meeting room of the Catalan Institute of Cartography.

For two days, the researchers and developers from Münster introduced a lively group of management personnel and developers from both public administration and private companies to the core concepts, standards and applications of SWE. The first day began with basics about OGC Sensor Observation Services and important standards for sensor descriptions and observation data. The group quickly applied the contents in hands-on work with the 52°North SOS implementation. The 52Ners pushed through a packed program, presenting the wide variety of SOS client applications and moving on to more specifications and software projects: Sensor Planning Service (SPS) and Sensor Event Service (SES) standard, as well as, Sensor Discovery with the Sensor Instance Registry (SIR). Observant questions from the attendees followed these presentations and practical exercises.

On the second day, the training staff delved deeper into the code demonstrating how to adapt the 52°North SOS to typical use cases, such as reusing existing databases, or adding the standardized interfaces to deployed sensor networks. Here we could really see the operational and specific interests of the attendees, who were given practical advice for upcoming projects.We look forward to hearing more from these folks using Sensor Web technologies!

The Sensor Web communities’ work was not the only topic. The 52°North team also presented web-based geoprocessing in theory and praxis with the Web Processing Service (WPS). With a closer look at event filtering technologies and alerting with EML, they provided a broad picture of online data handling for sensor data, rounding up the workshop.

Thanks go out to the workshop organizers for the great location and to the participants for their interest in our products and the lively discussions. Also a big thanks to the people behind the OSGeo Live DVD, which was used very successfully to enable practical experience and actual insight into the application of standard interfaces.