SensorWorld: Unified Touch-Based Access to Sensors Worldwide

Abstract

Sensors play a critical role in monitoring environmental metrics, predicting natural hazards and developing sustainable policies. However, policy makers, engineers, scientists, students, and other stakeholders in fields such as environmental and natural resources management very rarely have access to real-world large-scale sensor data. This problem is compounded significantly by diverse and non-standard software interfaces to sensors. Our goal is to document and make available data from a large variety of real-world sensors through an intuitive interface. Our project addresses this problem by implementing a middleware framework and a client on iPhone to facilitate access to sensor data. Currently, we support a total of 1136 sensors from a variety of sources and the dataset is being rapidly expanded.