Data Management in the Worldwide Sensor Web

IEEE Pervasive Computing, Volume 6, Number 2, Pages 30–40, 2007

Magdalena Balazinska, Amol Deshpande, Michael J. Franklin, Phillip B. Gibbons, Jim Gray, Mark Hansen, Michael Liebhold, Suman Nath, Alexander Szalay, and Vincent Tao

“Harvesting the benefits of a sensor-rich world presents many data management challenges. Recent advances in research and industry aim to address these challenges.

“With the rapidly increasing number of large-scale sensor network deployments, the vision of a worldwide sensor web is close to becoming a reality. Ranging from camera networks that monitor large wildlife reserves to biological sensors implanted in the body to monitor vital signs, these deployments generate tremendous volumes of priceless data. Simply put, data is the raison d’être of any sensing exercise. Most sensor network researchers would probably agree that we have placed too much attention on the networking of distributed sensing and too little on tools to manage, analyze, and understand the data. However, with standards in place for many of the networking and other infrastructure-related issues, or at least an emerging consensus on how to solve them, the demands of a sensor web are largely shaping up to be questions of information management. What, then, are the challenges in working with data in distributed sensing systems; what services might promote good data sharing and analysis practices? Can we design sensor networks with data quality in mind?”

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