Sensor Web Enablement for Coastal Buoy Systems

Coastal buoys and stations provide frequent, high-quality marine observations for weather service, public safety, atmospheric, and oceanographic study. However, sharing of the generated datasets, information, and results, between geographically distributed organizations often proves to be challenging. This is due to the complicated steps involved in data discovery and conversion of the data into usable information due to problems of syntactic, structural, and semantic heterogeneity in the datasets. Therefore, a standardized modeling framework is desired for the coastal buoys to provide enhanced capabilities for interoperability and to better disseminate the information. This study is developing an interoperable framework for coastal buoys using Sensor Model Language (SensorML) and other components (e.g., Observations & Measurements Schema (O&M), Transducer Markup Language (TransducerML), Sensor Observation Service (SOS), etc) of the OpenGeospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE). SensorML is a standard for the description of measurement devices and more complex measurement systems, in order to enable automatic processing of sensor data by generic software. In this study, buoys operated by the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) with different payloads (e.g., ARES, DACT, DART, GSBP, MARS, and VEEP) were described using SensorML. Each of these payloads has a variety of sensors used to measure the marine parameters (e.g., sea surface temperature, wind direction, wind speed, water level). Our framework of the proposed Coastal Sensor Web Enablement (CSWE) middleware for buoy systems is built upon the existing OGC web services. The Web service specifications such as Sensor Planning Service (SPS), Sensor Observation Service (SOS), and Sensor Alert Service (SAS) define how data collection requests are expressed, observations retrieved, and alert or alarm conditions defined. The integration of these components in the proposed architecture provides access to observations from sensors and sensor systems in a standard way that is consistent for all sensor systems including remote, in-situ, fixed and mobile sensors.