SENSOR OPEN DATA PORTAL
Art. 5 - by Olivier Bedel, Vincent Legloahec – Alkante SAS
The Sensor Open Data Portal (Sensor ODP) is one of the pilot applications developed in the ENERGIC OD project. As stated in its name, Sensor ODP aims at providing sensor measures, e.g. water temperature, wind strength or power consumption, as Open Data sources. More precisely, the application takes the form of a tool-chain: on one side, measures from existing and functional sensor networks are collected by ad hoc connectors. These measures are then transformed and stored in a devoted database. On the other side, these data can then be delivered in a standardized way, through OGC Web services (SOS, WFS, WMS). In addition, the application is also equipped with a Web portal that allows end users to visualize and query the set of collected measures.
Sensor ODP highly relies on the ENERGIC OD Virtual Hub architecture to make the data available to the greatest number of users in a form that conforms to their needs. Especially, thanks to data transformation capabilities of the Virtual Hub, sensor measures can be accessed in common Open Data formats (JSON, CSV...) and thus be combined and enriched with other open datasets by the Open Data community.
Making sensor measures easy to get and to process has nowadays become a strong necessity. In particular when dealing with environmental monitoring facilities, the European INSPIRE Directive requires environmental measures to be accessible in a standardized way. Furthermore, with the emergence of new IoT devices and networks, the concept of smart-cities, equipped with a large variety of connected sensors, is becoming a reality. There is a need for tools like Sensor ODP to collect, store and make sensor data available to the wider audience.
During the ENERGIC OD Project, Sensor ODP will be applied in various different contexts, with different kinds of sensor networks. Among others, an experiment is planned to monitor the temperature of inland waters, and another one to collect power consumption data of some public buildings. Sensor ODP is developed by the French partner Alkante within the ENERGIC OD project, co-financed by the European Union.