Arthur Herzog

Ontology paper: The SSN ontology of the W3C semantic sensor network incubator group

The W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator group (the SSN-XG) produced an OWL 2 ontology to describe sensors and observations - the SSN ontology, available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn. The SSN ontology can describe sensors in terms of capabilities, measurement processes, observations and deployments. This article describes the SSN ontology. It further gives an example and describes the use of the ontology in recent research projects.

MM-ulator: Towards a Common Evaluation Platform for Mixed Mode Environments

We investigate the interaction of mobile robots, relying on information provided by heterogeneous sensor nodes, to accomplish a mission. Cooperative, adaptive and responsive monitoring in Mixed-Mode Environments (MMEs) raises the need for multi-disciplinary research initiatives. To date, such research initiatives are limited since each discipline focusses on its domain specific simulation or testbed environment. Existing evaluation environments do not respect the interdependencies occurring in MMEs. As a consequence, holistic validation for development, debugging, and performance analysis requires an evaluation tool incorporating multi-disciplinary demands. In the context of MMEs, we discuss existing solutions and highlight the synergetic benefits of a common evaluation tool. Based on this analysis we present the concept of the MM-ulator : a novel architecture for an evaluation tool incorporating the necessary diversity for multi-agent hard-/software-in-the-loop simulation in a modular and scalable way.

Towards declarative query scoping in sensor networks

In the last decade, several large-scale wireless sensor networks have been deployed to monitor a variety of environments. The declarative nature of the database approach for accessing sensor data has gained great popularity because of both its simplicity and its energy-efficient implementation. At the same time another declarative abstraction made its way into mainstream sensor network deployments: user-defined groups of nodes. By restricting the set of nodes that participate in a task to such a group, the overall network lifetime can be prolonged. It is straightforward to see that integrating these two approaches, that is, restricting a querys scope to a group of sensor nodes, is beneficial. In this work we explore the integration of two such database and scoping technologies: TikiDB, a modern reincarnation of a sensor network query processor, and Scopes, a network-wide grouping mechanism.

A3ME — generic middleware for information exchange in heterogeneous environments

This paper presents a proof of concept for a generic middleware for heterogeneous sensor/actuator networks, which enables ad-hoc discovery, self-description exchange and basic interactions between heterogeneous devices. The main approach is to represent each device by a device-agent which knows its capabilities, constraints and policies, and is able to describe those to other devices on request.

Whac-A-Bee: a sensor network game

This paper illustrates both challenges and benefits found in expanding a traditional game concept to a situated environment with a distributed set of wireless sensing modules. Our pervasive game equivalent of the Whac-A-Mole game, Whac-A-Bee, retains the find-and-seek aspects of the original game while extending the location, the number of players, and the time-span in which it can be played. We discuss the obstacles met during this work, and specifically address challenges in making the game robust and flexible enough for large and long-term deployments in unknown territory.