Helping to Solve Drought with the Open Geospatial Consortium Sensor Observation Service

Workflow is a progressive technology that extricates scientists from the many complex procedures involved in computational applications. The modern era of computer technology has greatly increased the effectiveness and efficiency of scientific experiments through such concepts as Distributed Computing and Grid Computing. For example, the Open Geospatial Consortium has developed a number of services for its Sensor Web Enablement (SWE). The Sensor Observation Service (SOS) is one of these services and provides access to many kinds of sensor data. The SOS software is a set of XML Schemas and documents that, in conjunction with the Observation & Measurements (O&M) and Sensor Model Language (SensorML) from SWE, provides observations, measurements, and sensor description. The architectural design of the SOS makes it specially apt for Web services. In this project, an implementation of the SOS is realized. The service is deployed within the Web services container of the Globus grid middleware. The service can be invoked in a number of ways; for example, the Kepler workflow engine is able to invoke the service both directly and through the Grid Resource Allocation and Management (GRAM) Grid service, which is also available through Globus. Furthermore, the implementation may be extended by other SWE services such as the Web Notification Service (WNS) or Sensor Planning Service (SPS) through the XML Schema and documents and Web services. The Globus grid also provides authorization and authentication mechanisms, encryption, and GridFTP, in addition to GRAM. One goal of our SOS implementation is to study drought by correlating data obtained from a Davis Instruments Vantage Pro2 weather station, which is located at McNair Hall on the North Carolina A&T State University campus, along with data from other sensors.