Middleware for Plug and Play Integration of Heterogeneous Sensor Resources into the Sensor Web

The study of global phenomena requires the combination of a considerable amount of data coming from different sources, acquired by different observation platforms and managed by institutions working in different scientific fields. Merging this data to provide extensive and complete data sets to monitor the long-term, global changes of our oceans is a major challenge. The data acquisition and data archival procedures usually vary significantly depending on the acquisition platform. This lack of standardization ultimately leads to information silos, preventing the data to be effectively shared across different scientific communities. In the past years, important steps have been taken in order to improve both standardization and interoperability, such as the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) framework. Within this framework, standardized models and interfaces to archive, access and visualize the data from heterogeneous sensor resources have been proposed. However, due to the wide variety of software and hardware architectures presented by marine sensors and marine observation platforms, there is still a lack of uniform procedures to integrate sensors into existing SWE-based data infrastructures. In this work, a framework aimed to enable sensor plug and play integration into existing SWE-based data infrastructures is presented. First, an analysis of the operations required to automatically identify, configure and operate a sensor are analysed. Then, the metadata required for these operations is structured in a standard way. Afterwards, a modular, plug and play, SWE-based acquisition chain is proposed. Finally different use cases for this framework are presented.