A New Architecture for the Sensor Web: The SWAP Framework

Sensor Web is a revolutionary concept towards achieving a collaborative, coherent, consistent, and consolidated sensor data collection, fusion and distribution system. Sensor Webs can perform as an extensive monitoring and sensing system that provides timely, comprehensive, continuous and multi-mode observations. This new earth-observation system opens up a new avenue to fast assimilation of data from various sensors (both in situ and remote) and to accurate analysis and informed decision makings. So far, most of the sensor networks work in isolated environments rather than being integrated into a higher system of environmental systems. Our vision of the Sensor Web is an open infrastructure that allows end users to automatically access and extract and use appropriate information from multiple sensor sources over the Internet. This paper proposes an architectural framework, the Sensor Web Agent Platform (SWAP) that makes use of two of the most promising distributed architectural paradigms i.e. Web Services and Multi Agent Systems. SWAP allows for integrating arbitrary sensors or sensor networks into a loosely coupled higher level environment that facilitates developing and deploying end user applications across multiple application domains. An ontology framework and an abstract hierarchy are proposed for fusing and integrating data and storing and re-using generic information extraction techniques within the system.