Connecting islands in the internet of things

Abstract

With the increasing pace of change in computing technology, islands of relative stability become important to reaping the benefits of geospatial information. Geospatial standards are bases for persistent developments in the complex adaptive ecosystem of geospatial computing technology. Standards are the backbone of the Geoweb and will be also for the Internet of Things (IoT). At COM. Geo 2011, the workshop, "Expanding Geoweb to An Internet of Things", explored ways in which the success of the Geoweb were a basis for the emerging Internet of Things. COM. Geo 2012 aims to continue this discussion of sensor and mobile computing for geospatial research and application. IoT can be seen as a fuller expression of a vision of The Computer for the 21st Century (M. Weiser, 1991, Sci. Amer.). That vision of "Ubiquitous Computing" anticipated computers disappearing into the fabric of everyday life. What perhaps could not have been anticipated was how computing would be changed by the WWW making information ubiquitously accessible via the internet. Now, everyday objects with embedded computers are becoming ubiquitously accessible and interactive via the internet and mobile communications to the benefit of researchers, decision-makers, developers, and application users. Sensor webs and RFID are major elements of IoT. Beginning in 2000, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) anticipated the proliferation of network-accessible sensors and defined a set of Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards. SWE allows sensors to be used in user applications not anticipated with the initial deployment of the sensors. The AutoID lab is a pioneer identifying how RFID systems and SWE can work together to for understanding real world objects both from physical measurements and identity. Geospatial location is fundamental to IoT with the spaces in which IoT operates going beyond the geographic positioning technologies currently on mobile devices. Fusion of information from new sensors on-board mobile devices will enable positioning indoors and other locations where GPS is not present. "Indoor maps" with the complexity of 3 dimensions and complex route topology are needed for IoT be placed and used in a rich spatial computing context. End user applications will reap the benefits of ubiquitous information from IoT. Augmented Reality applications will allow users to view a rich set of information about the space around them both historical information and real-time information. The many domains of Business Intelligence will be informed by this stream of information enabling better decisions. OGC brings several innovative, yet stable standards to the computing and geospatial world of IoT. The second generation of SWE standards is currently being finalized. CityGML and IndoorGML meet the need for indoor maps. And the Augmented Reality Markup Language is poised to bring IoT information into a context aware visualization on mobile devices. OGC will continue to work with other standards developing organizations that address IoT, e.g., ITU, JTC1, IETF, OMA.