Towards Automated Instrument Management for Lake Monitoring Systems

For large-scale environmental observatories, managing sensors/instruments is a laborintensive and knowledge-intensive process. This encompasses deployment, configuration, calibration, integration into observing system, monitoring (e.g., determining instrument status), and remote interaction (e.g., changing sample rates, requesting data). In this paper, we propose a flexible and extensible data and metadata management architecture for a lake monitoring observatory deployed at Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site at the Trout Lake Station (TLS). The proposed system automates instrument management via novel cyberinfrastructure tools. To that end, metadata plays several roles within the information system for a variety of operations namely, instrument deployment, maintenance, system configuration, quality assurance, data discovery, data analysis, and data visualization.