We just submitted a paper outlining the challanges tiowards a semantic enabled sensor plug and play infrastructre for registering sensors and inserting observations at Sensor Observation Services. Attached is a link to our draft, I will replace it if the paper gets accepted (update: the paper has been accepted, see below).

Abstract The goal of the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is the definition of web service interfaces and data encodings to make sensors discoverable, taskable and accessible on the World Wide Web. The SWE specifications enable a standardized communication and interaction with arbitrary types of sensors and sensor systems. The central concepts within OGC’s Sensor Web architecture are sensors, observations and features of interest. Sensors and their observations can be registered and stored through the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) to make them accessible for clients. So far, mechanisms are missing which guarantee a correct semantic matching between real world entities and the features of interest stored in geo-databases. The same applies for the matching between observations as sensor outputs and the properties of the features of interest. By taking a use case from disaster management, we outline the challenges and demonstrate how semantically annotated SWE data models and service interfaces support correct semantic matching. The result is a roadmap towards a semantically enabled sensor plug \& play within the Sensor Web.

Bröring, A., Janowicz, K., Stasch, C., and Kuhn, W. (2009; forthcoming): Semantic Challenges for Sensor Plug and Play. 9th International Symposium on Web & Wireless Geographical Information Systems (W2GIS 2009). 7-8th December 2009, National Center for Geocomputation (NCG), NUI Maynooth Ireland.