A Sensor Web-Enabled Infrastructure for Precision Farming

The use of sensor technologies is standard practice in the domain of precision farming. The variety of vendor-specific sensor systems, control units and processing software has led to increasing efforts in establishing interoperable sensor networks and standardized sensor data infrastructures. This study utilizes open source software and adapts the standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium to introduce a method for the realization of a sensor data infrastructure for precision farming applications. The infrastructure covers the control of sensor systems, the access to sensor data, the transmission of sensor data to web services and the standardized storage of sensor data in a sensor web-enabled server. It permits end users and computer systems to access the sensor data in a well-defined way and to build applications on top of the sensor web services. The infrastructure is scalable to large scenarios, where a multitude of sensor systems and sensor web services are involved. A real-world field trial was set-up to prove the applicability of the infrastructure.