SANY Sensors Anywhere

SensorSA Catalogue supports automatic creation of meta-information. Since the meta-information schema was designed according to O&M, which is also used by the SOS, the Catalogue relies on SOS operations GetCapabilities and DescribeSensor for automatically harvesting of the meta-information necessary to create SANY meta-information documents.

In addition to automatic creation of SANY meta-information documents, the SensorSA catalogue can also harvest INSPIRE meta-information. In this case the information provided by the SOS is not sufficient for the creation of
instance documents compliant with INSPIRE schemas and must be extended. For more information on this, please refer to chapter 8.1.3 of the SANY Book.

To overcome problems with the discovery of unharmonized URNs used in phenomenon or feature of interest descriptions of an SOS, the principle of semantic annotation has been tested. In the test example a SOS provides links to an ontology and a lifting schema, which describes the relation between the ontology concepts and the SOS phenomenons. In order to provide flexibility, the W3C recommendation ‘Semantic Annotation for WSDL and XML Schema’ (SAWSDL) has been used (Farell, Lausen).

The harvesting operation infers from the phenomenon to the related ontology concept and includes the concept into the created meta-information document. The catalogue client provides the user access to the used ontology. The advantage is, that a user using the ontology concepts for his search will get more results than a user performing a search with a-priori knowledge of phenomenons available in the catalogue: a search for the observable property ‘relativeHumidity’ leads to results of a specific SOS. A search for ‘rf ’ leads to results of another SOS using this observable identifier for
the very same phenomenon. But a search using the ontology concept ‘relative_moisture’ related to meteorology leads to results of both SOS.