Sensor Web Enablement Standards for Groundwater Monitoring

Abstract : The French Geological Resources and Mining Bureau BRGM (Bureau des Ressources Géologiques et Minières) manages various environmental monitoring sensor networks such as their national piezometer network used to follow groundwater levels. The sensors on these networks have been integrated into the bureau's information system allowing the data to be used for analysis in studies of water consumption, of water quality, and of agricultural use. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) initiates the concept of the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE), which aims to provide standardized web based interface to these sensors and standardized sensor and sensor data models. Using SWE in Web Sensor Networks potentially improves discovery of and accessibility to data through web based search and data exchange mechanisms and potentially reduces costs by standardizing tasking and monitoring interfaces to the devices. In this chapter we describe our software system, the SWE-Piezo system, which extends the existing BRGM data acquisition and dissemination system by adding a standards based, web presence for the groundwater data. The system conforms to the core standards defined by the SWE initiative of the OGC. The SWE-Piezo objectives are to retrieve and access groundwater data. The SWE-Piezo system includes a web client viewer prototype based on Adobe flex technology, for accessing piezometers and piezometers data. Our experience demonstrates a quick approach to bringing the interoperability, scalability, and flexibility of the sensor web to existing sensor data collection networks.