On using a Sensor Observation Service as an INSPIRE-compliant download service
Due to the use of sensors, the volume of scientific data produced every day has become massive,, so there is a strong need to organize them and to set up a data infrastructure for their efficient management. Open access, FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) and INSPIRE-compliance are increasingly becoming the norm for (environmental) data management. In order to achieve complex aspirations such as FAIRness and INSPIRE-compliance a simple idea might help: “Collect Once, Use many times”. Data collected today must be stored, documented and published in order to increase their knowledge extraction and to allow for an efficient re-use in the future. With the multiplication of sensor deployments in monitoring programmes, the new challenge is to publish time-series efficiently using state-of-the-art technologies.
The MOMO project (MOnitoring and Modeling of the cohesive sediment transport and the evaluation of the effects on the marine ecosystem resulting from dredging and dumping operations) has been deploying tripod platforms consisting of ADCP and ADC sensor packages in the Belgian Part of the North Sea for the last two decades. These deployments generated considerable amounts of valuable data that are currently stored as csv-formatted text files that are not interoperable, both in terms of content and access protocol. The full potential of those data is currently safeguarded only thanks to the knowledge and expertise of the scientists involved in the project. The consequences of knowledge loss is therefore significant.
The objective of this work is to explore the merit of implementing an Open Geospatial Consortium Sensor Observation Service (OGC SOS) for the publication of FAIR INSPIRE-compliant time-series data. The INSPIRE directive must be applied to data by the end of 2020 so the question is: “can a data provider be INSPIRE-compliant using SOS without complex and heavy developments?”
The 52°North SOS implementation was chosen in this project, partly because they provide a complete open-source solution (database creation, SOS client and SOS viewer).
deville_IMDIS_SOS_2021.pdf — PDF document, 476 KB (487654 bytes)