Integrating the Ogc Sensor Web Enablement Framework into the Ogc Catalogue

The Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) architecture of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has reached a broad acceptance. However, although the core specifications reached a mature state, the integration of a cataloguing service for sensors has not yet been achieved. Previous work focused on registries that address the specifics of dynamic sensor networks, on mechanisms for handling the semantics of phenomena and on metadata models based on the Sensor Model Language (SensorML). This work describes how existing elements supporting sensor discovery can be coupled with the already well established OGC Catalogue Service (CSW). The approach presented in this work relies on a SensorML profile specifying metadata necessary and sufficient for sensor discovery. SensorML documents that conform to the profile are automatically harvested from SWE services by a lower level registry and are subsequently transformed into an information model supported by the CSW. Finally the metadata is pushed into CSW instances and becomes available through the CSW interface. In summary, this work presents for the first time a working example how resources provided through SWE services can automatically be published through common OGC Catalogue Service instances. We expect that the presented approach is an important step in order to achieve a full integration of SWE components into spatial data infrastructures and to offer SWE services to a broader audience.