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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing 
2. | SENSORS 
"In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic 
skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and 
transmit. sensations. This skin is already being stitched 
together. lt consists of millions of embedded electronic 
measuring devices: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution 
detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, 
electroencephalographs. These will probe and monitor cities 
and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways 
and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodies even our 
dreams.” [3] 
One of the important activities in the GIS domain is 
data collection from the wanted area. Over the time many 
attempts by the scientists in the world have been accomplished 
to find the best way of data collection. One of these attempts 
result led to invention of the new technology which called 
sensor technology. 
Using Sensors in many of the business have some 
favorites for users, such as: 
e Real-time Data Capturing: Sensors give organizations 
the capability to receive real-time data and 
information about a situation or environment, 
wherever it is happening or located. 
* Lead to Better Knowledge and Tracking throughout 
the Supply Chain: Sensors embedded in objects will 
enable manufacturers to increase their knowledge of 
products at all stages through the supply chain, from 
manufacturing to distribution to logistics. 
* Lead to Consumer Trending: Wireless remote 
sensing combined with other data such as economic 
or market information can lead to useful trending of 
consumer tastes and preferences. This will deliver 
real-time customer insights while also providing 
valuable information on product life cycles. 
* Provide Basis for Simulation: One of the key aspects 
of the Reality Online vision is a digital copy of an 
environment, object or person. Sensors will be one 
technology by which virtual doubles of environments 
will be created. 
* Spur the New Applications 
In general we have two types of sensors: remote 
Sensors, which measure physical properties at some distance 
from the sensor and in-situ sensors, which measure a physical 
property within the arca immediately surrounding the sensor 
2]. 
Today, technological innovations have moved sensors 
well beyond their original capability as simple, standalone 
detection devices; they are now much more important than that. 
By continuously connecting a variety of sensors through 
wired/wireless connections, sensors are moving beyond 
individual smart objects to more complex networks that will 
enable people to "see" more of the physical world and act on it. 
In fact, for some purposes, having a collection of 
Sensors will be gratefully useful; a sensor collection can be in 
three following types: 
* Sensor Package: Composed of multiple sensors that 
operate together to provide a collective observation 
or related group of observations. For example, a 
group of individual sensors that measure different 
chemical species can be grouped as one sensor that 
provides “water quality”. 
1149 
and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B4. Istanbul 2004 
e Sensor array: A set of sensors of the same type at 
different locations. 
e Sensor Web: Can be seen as a system composed of 
multiple science instrumenUprocessor platforms that 
are interconnected by means of a communications 
fabric for the purpose of collecting measurements and 
processing data for Earth or Space Science 
objectives. The most unique feature of the sensor web 
is that information gathered by one pod is shared and 
used by other pods. While distributed sensors 
networks only gather data, communicate and uplink 
to a centre. 
3. WEB SERVICE 
A formal definition of a web service may be borrowed 
from IBM's tutorial: 
"Web services are a new breed of Web application. 
They are self-contained, self-describing. modular applications 
that can be published, located, and invoked across the Web. 
Web services perform functions, which can be anything from 
simple requests to complicated business processes...Once a 
Web service is deployed, other applications (and other Web 
services) can discover and invoke the deployed service. “ 
It is obvious from this statement that the industry vision 
for Web Services perfectly correspond to the goal of designing 
an interoperable architecture for data fusion, data analysis or 
data sharing between different sensors/sensor webs. In such 
architecture, a web service is like a bridge for access to data or 
analysis tools of sensors/sensor webs which could be deployed 
for different purposes (Figure 1). 
  
Figure 1: General web service architecture 
4. SENSOR COLLECTION SERVICE (SCS) 
With the rising trend in using Internet, accessing to 
environmental data via Internet has an important role in many 
of environmental projects. Sensor Collection Service (SCS) is 
introduced as a typical OpenGIS Consortium Geo Web Service 
that deals with sensors and provides the user facilities to access 
environmental sensor data through Internet. Clients 
implementing SCS can also obtain information that describes 
the associated sensors and platforms. 
From viewpoint of implementation specification, SCS 
provides at least two operations as interfaces for client to 
interact with the service. The operations provide different 
facilities. Two available operations supported by SCS are 
GetCapabilities and GetObservation (Figure 2). 
  
Figure 2: SCS as Service Provider, provides GetCapabilities 
and GetObservation interfaces