Air Quality Sensing

Developing a platform for integrating Citizen Science measurements and authoritative air quality data

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission has been working extensively over the past few years on ways to use lower cost sensors to complement authoritative air quality data (e.g., the AirSensEUR project). Expanding upon their experience, they initiated a new activity involving three European cities as pilot sites (Antwerp, Oslo, and Zagreb).
JRC needs a data management platform to collect the data of low-cost air quality sensor boxes as well as the  authoritative data measured by the official agencies. This data platform is based on the OGC interoperability standards Sensor Observation Service (SOS) and SensorThings API specifications, which are compliant to the INSPIRE guidelines.

52°North’s work revolves around the integration of a data validation process based on R/Shiny. The process calibrates the low-cost sensor data measurements to the official measurements. Visualization functionality is also important so that users can view and explore the collected data. We have adapted the Helgoland Sensor Web Viewer according to JRC’s requirements.

We completed the implementation of the AQSens Data Platform in 2020. This resulted in a Docker-based deployment. We also developed data ingestion workflows in R using reference data from Antwerp, Oslo, and Zagreb, as well as raw  and predicted data. Additionally, our team carried out adjustments to the server components SOS, SensorThings API and Helgoland API, and customized a version of the Helgoland Sensor Web Viewer for JRC.