LSane: Collaborative validation and enrichment of heterogeneous observation streams

The increasing amount of publicly available data streams of environmental observation stations opens up new opportunities: domain experts are provided with an extensive amount of observations covering large areas with high density of environmental sensors, which could hardly ever be provided by a single organization. However, these opportunities come at the cost of new challenges regarding trustworthiness and comparability of such observations. In this paper, we address the challenges of semantic validation and enrichment of heterogeneous observation streams by exploiting collaboratively created and curated annotations. For this purpose, we introduce and discuss the Linked Stream Annotation Engine (LSane) to validate observation messages from heterogeneous sensors. We enrich these observation messages with provenance information derived from annotations. We present an implementation of LSane with messages from public and private environmental observation stations, which are mapped to explicit semantics, and validate and enrich the mapped messages based on annotations from the LSane collaboration platform.