After two years of hard work, the Sensor Web community is pleased to announce the 52°North SOS 4.0.0 Final Release ! This release benefits from experience gained over the past few years and implements improvements and features requested by SOS operators and users.
Sensor Web & Smart Cities Workshop
– Workshop for Building Smart Cities Applications with Sensor Web
Sensor data plays an important role in smart cities applications by adding a real time dimension to the overall city situation. Typical fields of application are air quality, weather, traffic conditions and their resulting influence on city life. Simultaneously, OGC Sensor Web Enablement technology provides fundamental building blocks to flexibly create diverse applications based on sensors and their data.more >
Using NetCDF files as an SOS data source
Greetings Sensor Web Community,
My name is Christian Danowski and I plan to finish my Bachelor degree in geoinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences Bochum in February next year. Prior to the Bachelor thesis, I had the great opportunity to experience a twelve week internship at 52°North (52N). I intend to share my experience with you in this blog article.
During the internship, my task was to develop a new data source component for the 52N Sensor Observation Service (SOS) within the context of the European Project GEOWOW. The idea was to use a file system of NetCDF files as a data source instead of a database. Hence the necessary information provided to the SOS is not stored inside a database like PostGIS anymore, but in the NetCDF files itself. In the following paragraphs I will try to briefly explain the background of NetCDF and the steps of the development process.
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A look into WPS branches – Today: Conflation with Provenance
The 52°North WPS implementation shares one important property with the specification – it is very flexible and can be used for many different use cases. A number of parties contribute, which results in a number of active development branches for code. We present a selection in blog posts in the series “A look into WPS branches”.
Conflation With Provenance – Custom WPS Processes
Similar to the efforts on Aviation-specific processing, 52°North developed processes for conflating two distinct data sets in the scope of the OWS 9 test bed. This article sheds some light on the details of the processes and the obstacles which need to be overcome.
Conflation is understood as a sophisticated process of unifying two or more separate data sets that share certain characteristics into one integrated all-encompassing dataset. In the process, different representations of a feature get folded into one feature. That target feature follows a particular model that is used to capture complementary information. In addition to the actual dataset conflation, the consistent capturing of provenance information was another goal of the project. The conflation processes developed represent a very customized and complex workflow. The test bed proved that the 52°North WPS framework fits perfectly into such use cases by providing an individual and flexible processing API.