With EGU 2020 cancelled, this blog post elaborates on the abstract submitted by the 52°North software project sos4R development team. See the program entry for the abstract EGU2020-19453 in the official program. Please refer to this work by citing the DOI https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-19453.
Accessing environmental time series data in R from Sensor Observation Services with ease
Introduction
Time series data of in-situ measurements are the key to many environmental studies. The first challenge in any analysis typically arises when the data needs to be imported into the analysis framework. Standardization is one way to lighten this burden. Unfortunately, relevant interoperability standards might be challenging for non-IT experts as long as they are not dealt with behind the scenes of a client application. One standard to provide access to environmental time series data is the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) specification published by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). SOS instances are currently used in a broad range of applications such as hydrology, air quality monitoring, and ocean sciences. Data sets provided via an SOS interface can be found around the globe from Europe to New Zealand.
The R package sos4R (Nüst et al., 2011) is an extension package for the R environment for statistical computing and visualization, which has been demonstrated as a powerful tool for conducting and communicating geospatial research (cf. Pebesma et al., 2012). The features presented in this article are available in the new release version 0.4 on CRAN.more >
