Logo of 52°North

Sensor Observation Service

The Sensor Observation Service aggregates readings from live, in-situ and remote sensors. The service provides an interface to make sensors and sensor data archives accessible via an interoperable web based interface. Four profiles are defined within the SOS specification: core, transactional, enhanced, and entire. The current release (52N-SOS-3.2.0) implements the core profile comprising the mandatory operations:

The transactional profile comprising of the following operations is implemented, too:

  • RegisterSensor, for signing up new sensors.
  • InsertObservation, for inserting new observations for registered sensors.

Additionally, the following operations are implemted:

  • GetFeatureOfInterest, for requesting the GML encoded representation of the feature that is the target of the observation.
  • GetResult, for periodically polling of sensor data

The current release implements the latest schema version (1.0.0).

SOS Clients

There are multiple clients for the SOS developed by 52°North. Based upon the OX-Framework both thin clients and thick clients can be developed for your use cases. Also other web services such as the OGC Web Processing Services can access the provided data of the 52°North SOS to generate new data, compute simulations or other highler level data products. The 52North geostatistics community developed the R package sos4R to download data from SOS directly into the R software environment for statistical computing and allow manifold analyses and powerful visualization.

Besides the different clients developed within 52°North, there are other parties who develop interesting SOS clients. An example is the browser-based client of the Tasmanian hydrological sensor web implemented by CSIRO. Have a look and try it out yourself: here. The sensor data which can be displayed by this client is provided by a 52°North SOS instance.

SOS Demo

Besides several demo videos of our different SOS client applications we are maintaining running demo instances which you could use for testing or hands-on experience.

Examples of 52N-SOS-3.1.1:

1. http://giv-sos.uni-muenster.de:8080/52nSOSv3/

2. http://v-swe.uni-muenster.de:8080/WeatherSOS/

3. http://v-sos.uni-muenster.de:8080/PegelOnlineSOSv2/

Code Manager

In charge of the SOS quality management and in control of its source code is:

  • Carsten Hollmann

Contributing Developers

  • Alexander C. Walkowski
  • Alexander Strotmann
  • Alexandre Robin (Sensia Software)
  • Christoph Beekmanns
  • Christoph Stasch
  • Martin Kiesow
  • Oliver Meyer
  • Stephan Kuenster