^2012-05-30

52°North's Sensor Web Software helps to sense a changing world. This was apparant at the recent second Sensing a Changing World Workshop in Wageningen, NL. Researchers, developers and users of Sensor Web technology met to discuss the current state-of-the art developments and identify future research challenges to improve the application of various sensor concepts and techniques in the environmental sciences domains. 52°North experts shared their expertise.

The first workshop was held three years ago in Wageningen and brought together 80 researchers from 12 countries to discuss and elucidate common concepts about how to make use of sensor networks to analyze human behavior and monitor environmental processes in a changing world. This year's edition, although smaller, was by no means less interesting. Within a wide range of topics, common notions were real-time and mobile sensors, quality and uncertainty in sensor data, as well as deriving higher level information from low-level sensor data, all important 52°North themes. Most of the applications presented were based Sensor Web standards. 52°North is pleased that other participants make use of 52°North software, most notably the Sensor Web client and the Sensor Observation Service.

Presentations with 52°North community involvement included:

• Simon Jirka, Sensor Web Community Leader, reported on practical experiences with Sensor Web technology, from several years of research projects.
• Christoph Stasch from the Sensor Web Community, the original software architect for the SOS, presented a new approach to represent uncertainties in the Sensor Web.
• Daniel Nüst from the Geostaticstics Community presented recent developments combining 52°North Sensor Web services SOS and WPS with the R software environment. The resulting software, the WPS4R enables the exposure of R scripts via the WPS4R interface.