OGC Best Practice for Sensor Web Enablement Lightweight SOS Profile for Stationary In-Situ Sensors. Version 1.0.

Abstract

The OGC Sensor Web Enablement architecture (SWE) addresses the integration of sensors and sensor data into Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Within the SWE architecture the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) plays a central role as it defines an interface for accessing sensor data and metadata. This document describes a lightweight profile of the SOS and the data formats used by the SOS: Observations & Measurements (O&M) for encoding measurement data and the Sensor Model Language (SensorML) for encoding metadata. Other SWE standards which provide more specialized functionality are not part of this minimum lightweight SWE profile. This profile has been designed in a way that is on the one hand efficient and easy to implement and on the other hand standard compliant. Especially the following aspects were considered during the creation of the profile: -- Reducing the number of operations: certain operations of the SOS standard were designed for very specific needs; these operations were left out of this profile -- Reducing the complexity of the SOS operations (e.g. less complex filters for requesting sensor data) -- Focus on fixed in-situ sensors as these sensors are the type of sensors that are used in the broad majority of SWE use cases in practice (for widening this focus in future, extensions may be developed) In summary the main objective that guided the development of this profile was to support those use cases which are regularly occurring in practice and to leave out those with very specific requirements that go beyond the broad mass of SWE use cases.