Management of Sensor Data with Open Standards

In an emergency, getting up-to-date information about the current situation is crucial to orchestrate an efficient response. Due to its objectivity, preciseness and comparability, time-series data offer broad possibilities to manage emergency incidents. Since the Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly growing with an estimated number of 30 billion sensors in 2020, it offers excellent potential to collect time-series data for improving situational awareness. The IoT brings several challenges: caused by a splintered sensor manufacturer landscape, data comes in various structures, incompatible protocols and unclear semantics. To tackle these challenges a well-defined interface, from where uniform data can be queried, is necessary. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has recognized this demand and developed the Sensor Things API standard, an open, unified way to interconnect devices throughout the IoT, which is implemented by the FRaunhofer-Open source-SensorThings-Server (FROST). This paper presents the standard, its implementation and the application to the domain of crisis management.