Live Geography -- Embedded Sensing for Standarised Urban Environmental Monitoring

Abstract

Environmental monitoring faces a variety of complex technical and socio-political challenges, particularly in the urban context. Data sources may be available, but mostly not combinable because of lacking interoperability and deficient coordination due to monolithic and closed data infrastructures. In this work we present the Live Geography approach that seeks to tackle these challenges with an open sensing infrastructure for monitoring applications. Our system makes extensive use of open (geospatial) standards throughout the entire process chain – from sensor data integration to analysis, Complex Event Processing (CEP), alerting, and finally visualisation. We discuss the implemented modules as well as the overall created infrastructure as a whole. Finally, we show how the methodology can influence the city and its inhabitants by „making the abstract real“, in other words how pervasive environmental monitoring systems can change urban social interactions, and which issues are related to establishing such systems.