Geospatial Sensing Conference demonstrates a broad range of applications for Sensor Web and related technology

The Geospatial Sensing Conference 2019 welcomed a variety of geospatial sensing researchers and practitioners to Münster. From September 2nd – 4th approximately 50 participants from research, industry and public administration exchanged ideas about practical applications, emerging trends, user requirements, and future developments.

Overview

Pre-conference tutorials addressed the usage of  Copernicus Sentinel data for several domains (e.g. hydrology), data import/export within the Sensor Web as well as the management and visualization of Sensor Web data. The conference track promoted a broad exchange on the status, emerging trends and future directions of technologies to collect, share, manage, discover, access and use sensor data. Additional workshop sessions explored ideas for a future roadmap including challenges, new use cases and possible solutions to data management, analytics and visualization.

Conclusion

Conference presentations provided insight into different applications and the challenges of sensor data infrastructure technologies. A number of practical applications, such as the Wupperverband’s dam monitoring system, the ReefTEMPS project, the German Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency’s Sensor Web viewer or the BelAir project for communicating air quality information via a smartphone app, were exhibited. Scientific research activities addressed the discovery of relevant data sets, the creation of data processing workflows (e.g. the RIESGOS project) as well as the application in citizen science scenarios (e.g. the OGC Citizen Science Interoperability Experiment) and Earth Observation (e.g. the MuDak-WRM and OpenEO projects). The participants noted an increase in the number of application domains using the technologies presented. An additional important trend is the emphasis on using light-weight protocols for sensor data exchange. The conference presentation slides are available online.

Outlook

The 52°North Team is pleased with the success of the event and has begun preparations for the 2020 community event. More information, such as date and call for presentations will be published via the 52°North Website and communication channels.