The SID Creator: A Visual Approach for Integrating Sensors with the Sensor Web

This paper describes the Sensor Interface Descriptor (SID) model and focuses on presenting and evaluating the SID creator, a visual approach to create instances of the SID model. Those SID instances comprise the knowledge required to integrate a sensor with the Sensor Web. This integration is done by an SID interpreter which uses an SID instance to translate between a sensor protocol and the Sensor Web protocols. An SID instance, designed for a particular sensor type, can be reused in multiple applications and can be shared among user communities. The SID creator enables users to describe the interface, commands and metadata of their sensors. In a user study, we evaluated the simplification of the sensor integration process through the SID concept. The study incorporated four user groups, ranging from high school students to expert users, who were challenged to integrate weather station sensors with the Sensor Web by utilizing the SID creator. While the common approaches of integrating such sensors with the Sensor Web involve manual coding and extensive adaptation efforts, this new visual approach significantly simplifies the integration process.