Time Series Toolbox

AIT decided to continue the TS-Toolbox development after the project end, and publish most of the components and several example applications under terms of the GPL. Please follow this link for more information.

The Time Series Toolbox (TS Toolbox) is a set of software components and application programming interfaces that simplify the task of building applications that record, process, store and publish time series of observations.

In SANY the TS Toolbox components are used in the following applications: the Cascading SOS Service, the SensorSA Data Acquisition System, Generic Time Viewer, and in the Universal Data Pump – a simple application that provides a convenient way for transporting data from one application, service or file for which a TS-Toolbox data connector exists to another.

The TS Toolbox contains software components for the following functional areas:

  • Data connector components implementing access to data using various protocols and data formats
  • Core components interfacing with the connector components and providing specific additional functionalities like data processing or caching
  • Frontend components implementing interface functionality (user interfaces or software interfaces)

The functionalities implemented by TS Toolbox components provide application developers with higher-level building blocks than typical general purpose libraries, and allow rapid development of fully fledged applications. The TS Toolbox also includes example applications that can be either used as they are, or as a basis for developing more complex applications. At a time of publishing this information, the TS-Toolbox included following components:
Components of the Time Series Toolbox

Core Components

The TS Toolbox currently includes two reusable implementations of ‘core’ components:

  • Formula 3, a concise, text-oriented, high-level language for manipulation and transformation of time series data, enabling users to efficiently implement processing logic.
  • A caching component, which allows temporary storage of the data within an application and offers an easy way for including pre-fetching and caching capabilities in applications and services.

Frontend Components

The ‘frontend’ TS Toolbox components provide interfaces to users or other applications. Currently, three frontend components exist:

  • The SOS frontend component simplifies the task of developing applications with an OGC Sensor Observation Service compliant interface. It provides an implementation of a SOS service on top of the Time Series API, and is based on the 52° North SOS implementation.
  • The Data Pump frontend component implements functionality for transporting time series data from one data connector component to another. As such it can be easily used for creating applications to import and export data between applications.
  • The GTV frontend component implements functionality for building GUI client applications for accessing and displaying time series data.

Data Connectors

The ‘data connector’ TS Toolbox components provide access to data using various protocols and data formats; this includes three general purpose data connector implementations:

  • SOS connector: by using this connector implementation, applications can be interfaced to OGC SOS compliant services. Currently the SOS connector supports reading data from a SOS service, and storing data in a SOS service using the transactional profile of the SOS specification.
  • CSV connector: many legacy applications implement functionality to export data in simple comma- or tab-separated text files. The CSV connector component allows seamless integration of this type of data in TS Toolbox-based applications.
  • AnySen connector: an implementation of a data connector fetching data from a sensor driver that interfaces with physical sensors. The AnySen connector implements a flexible configuration scheme allowing it to be adapted to different vendor protocols.

The TS Toolbox also includes one example of a ‘legacy connector’, which is used to access the air quality data stored in the proprietary data acquisition system 'UWEDAT' monitoring systems (not included in GPL edition). Legacy connectors allow much tighter integration of legacy applications, e.g. real time access; storing altered data back to original service etc., than exporting and/or importing data to integrate those applications.