OGC SensorThings API 

2023, February 1°. As part of the USAGE Project, our partner OGC hosted a workshop on FAIR solutions for dynamic sensor data.

Download all the presentations here

OGC (partner of the USAGE project)

Francesca Noardo opened the session with an overview of OGC's mission, focusing on FAIR principles and the development of standards to support interoperability, linked to the activities of the OGC Innovation Program. She announced the upcoming opening of an OGC Academy. 

European Commission DG JRC 

Marco Minghini - On the Science for Policy Report (published in 2021) on the INSPIRE updates, you can read the vision for the future of INSPIRE and SDIs. The ultimate goal of data sharing and interoperability is to support the urban policy lifecycle: it must be integrated into policy frameworks. From a technological perspective, we want to encourage the adoption of well-documented standard APIs. There is a need to focus on GP proposals from the community. It is a step-by-step process for GP. OGC STA GP is an alternative for download services, focusing on coding and data sharing aspects. Next steps are to support STA-based download services in INSPIRE GeoPortal and INSPIRE Reference Validator. 

Therefore, we welcomed the USAGE project to provide feedback useful to improve the GP.

We presented implementations and success stories based on open solutions as:

DataCove 

Kathi Schleidt - API4INSPIRE: mentioned GP and ELISE funding. "You don't need a sensor to love sensors," she said about Air Quality Applications and COVID case information. STA data model. She listed all classes of the data model with details on API and "Tailoring Responses."

BRGM, France 

Sylvain Grellet, Mickaël Beaufils - SensorThings for water measurements. They said it records a growing interest in OGC STA in France in several environmental application areas, for the Management of National Groundwater Monitoring (FROST implementation of STA). The National Water Quality Database has received over 130 million observations, although taxonomies have not yet been mapped between France and Germany). 

Fraunhofer Institute, Germany 

Hylke van der Schaaf - Smart cities examples: Hamburg, Berlin, Erfurt

University of Calgary 

Steve Liang - SensorHub

Deda Next, Italy (partner of USAGE)

Luca Giovannini - Implementing SensorThings in Ferrara (Air-Break) and Trentino (Highlander): the architecture developed, as an aggregator and not the owner of the sensor's network. QGIS STA plugin. 

Then we started a conversation with a round table with representatives from Italian authorities. See the following presentations:

• • ISPRA (Luisa Vaccaro). RDF encoding with SPARQL queries enablement. Ideas for the future: LOD (PDND), ontologies, near real-time air quality data to be exposed in conformance to INSPIRE.

  • Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale - Antonio Rotundo suggested including in the Italian guidelines a section related to dynamic data and reference to OGC STA as an INSPIRE download service.

  • Regione Emilia-Romagna | Stefano Olivucci said that there are many dynamic data that could be exposed but not so high experience yet on exposing dynamic data, so great interest to follow up.

  • ARPAE Emilia-Romagna - Paolo Veronesi clarified that air quality data today are collected in near real-time, historical and interim meteorological data, and time series related to different environmental matrices. In the future, it is necessary to publish procedures, and use drones (airborne and marine), AI algorithms to process data collected by smart sensors.

  • AMI Ferrara - Oscar Formaggi said that there is a need to Focus on the management of dynamic mobility-related data. It would be crucial to create a dashboard for analyzing mobility data in the next future.

In the last part of the workshop, our coordinator Oscar Corcho (Universidad Politecnica Madrid) showcased the USAGE project with examples from the City of Zaragoza.

Other EU projects were illustrated, as

• • All4GD All Data 4 Green Deal (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - Joan Maso) aims to integrate APIs and mainly STA, focusing on end users and semantic interoperability. Several tasks within use cases related to STA implementation, but need to deal with different IoT standards and further needs of Citizen Science data. 

• • EDIAQI (Know Center - Mario Lovrić) - SensorThings for Evidence Driven Indoor Air Quality Improvement. Several dynamic data related to outdoor/indoor air quality measurement campaigns in several cities. Indoor air quality data in public buildings and households. Project task on data interoperability. GDPR data (occupancy and behaviour). 

• • HIGHLANDER and SEBASTIEN (University Tuscia - Giovanni Vignali) - IoT for animal well-being to prevent impacts of climate change (mainly heat waves). Use of STA to populate dashboards helping farmers. Plans for the future: increase the number of monitored animals, through additional projects.