SANY Sensors Anywhere

Services in the SensorSA are designed to support applications that serve the needs of users. They may call other services if this is required to fulfil the functions offered at their interfaces. In an extended situation, chains of service operation calls may be defined in order to realize more complex functionality. In a service network every service instance may call operations of any other service. The Service Viewpoint of the SensorSA categorises service types into functional domains expressing the area of concern for which they are basically designed:

• Services in the Sensor Domain cope with the configuration and management of individual sensors and their organization in sensor networks. They are abstractions from the proprietary mechanisms and protocols of sensor networks. An example is a take-over service in case of an imminent sensor battery failure.
  
• Services in the Acquisition Domain deal with access to observations gathered by sensors. This includes other components in a sensor network, e.g. a database or a model that may offer their information in the same way, i.e. as observations. The information acquisition process may be organised in a hierarchical fashion by means of intermediate instances, e.g. with data loggers
  
• Services in the Mediation and Processing Domain are specified independently of the fact that the information may stem from a source system of type ‘sensor’. They mediate access from the application domain
  to the underlying information sources. They provide generic or thematic processing capabilities such as fusion of information, the management of models and the access to model results. In addition, support for service
  discovery, sensor planning and the management of events and alerts are grouped in this domain.

• Services in the Application Domain support the rendering of information in the form of maps, diagrams and reports such that they may be presented to the user in the user domain.
• The functionality of the User Domain is to support the interface to the end user, typically in a graphical fashion.