Sensors exist to monitor everything from weather conditions, seismic activity and traffic flow to beach bacteria, smoke and chemical emissions, and reservoir water levels. Communicating all that data to the right people at the right time, however, has often been a problem.
Now, a new Internet application called Sensorpedia, developed by Oak Ridge, Tenn., National Laboratory, creates a man-machine network with the potential to aggregate the universe of sensor data in one place for easy access.
“The next wave in information technology is Big Data, unprecedented real-time and historical data from sensors, wired infrastructures, cell phones, databases and social networks,” said ORNL senior research associate Bryan Gorman.
Corporate giants like IBM and Hewlett-Packard already have major research efforts under way to harness the potential of Big Data to improve social, economic and physical environments. Sensorpedia applies Big Data concepts to emergency response and homeland security, as well as science and education.
Sensorpedia is based on the same underlying social networking and collaboration principles used by popular web sites like Wikipedia, Squidoo, Google Maps and Facebook, but instead of networking users based on mutual personal interests, Sensorpedia networks users based on mutual information interests.
“The Sensorpedia project addresses the challenge of finding and sharing sensor data for federal, state and local government agencies,” Gorman said. The idea is to get the right sensor information to the right user or application at the right time.
Sensorpedia allows users to publish, subscribe to, search for, connect to and view all kinds of sensors and all types of sensor data collected from around the country or around the world.
Currently, Sensorpedia is in limited beta testing, but a Sneak Peek for non-beta users is available. The researchers expect to go live with the service by the end of this year.
For emergency responders, including military and homeland security users, the fusion of sensor data offers a major improvement in the accuracy of situational awareness. Sensorpedia could dramatically simplify user and application access to otherwise disparate sources. An internal application programming interface provides instructions for interfacing sensors, sensor data and sensor alerts to Sensorpedia.
“Applications that provide predictive analytics, collaborative common operational pictures and alerts are all potential applications that will use Sensorpedia,” Gorman said.