SANY Sensors Anywhere

The SensorSA concepts are realised following the guidelines and technologies of standard (Web) service platforms. However, there are competing Web service paradigms on the market with disparate protocol bindings (e.g. SOAP or HTTP) and capability descriptions (e.g. service-oriented or resource-oriented). The technologies for these service platforms rely upon specifications of W3C, OGC and OASIS.

In order to enable service interoperability, the SensorSA separates the platform specification into a core mandatory part and one or more optional platform specific parts. Three platforms are currently supported: W3C Web Services, OGC Web Services and so called RESTful Web Services for the resource-oriented approach.

The SensorSA core mandatory part refers to W3C Web Services which is, according to a decision of the OGC Technical Committee, also the strategic direction for all new specified OGC services. It requires a SOAP envelope embedded into an HTTP message as the transport protocol and WSDL as the service description language. Optionally, HTTP may also be used directly. This enables to also use the OGC Web services as they are specified today.

Optional, RESTful Web Service interfaces rely upon the principle of Representational State Transfer (REST) which means, that the call of service operation is considered as a transfer of state information of uniquely identifiable resources in form of resource representations. In the SensorSA, the resources are typically geospatial resources described in a resource model, e.g. a collection of sensor observations with a known geo-location reference, and their representations, which may be maps, tables or diagrams.

The multi-platform approach of the SensorSA facilitates the reuse and integration of existing software components and the evaluation of other service paradigms.