Lightweight Access Layer to Sensor Data
Supporting the efficient implementation of Sensor Web clients
This lightweight API provides a complementary light access layer to sensor data via a RESTful Web binding. It offers an additional mechanism for data access, which has been optimized to reflect our experience gained during the development of Sensor Web client applications. Thus, it can be considered a convenience layer that facilitates the use of Sensor Web servers.
The API provides a thin access layer offering several functionalities:
- Pre-rendering of time series data (e.g., for embedding pre-rendered diagrams into Web sites)
- Generalization of sensor data sets for reducing the transmitted data volume
- Support of different types of observation data: time series, profiles, trajectories, samplings
- Overlaying of data from multiple data sets
- Conversion of raw data to other formats such as CSV, PDF and PNG
- Comprehensive functionality for exploring, discovering, filtering and accessing observation data.
The REST API can be deployed in two modes: as a 52°North Sensor Web Server module residing on an observation database, or in a proxy mode so that external data sources can be integrated into Sensor Web environments.
Benefits
- Lightweight protocol and encoding
- Convenience functionality for client developers to increase their efficiency
- Functionality going beyond the available standard interfaces (e.g., data generalization, rendering functionality, data conversion)
Fields of Application
Hydrology, air quality (e-reporting), environmental monitoring, ocean sciences, tracking
References
Software
GitHub: https://github.com/52North/sensorweb-server-helgoland