David R. Resseguie

Sensorpedia: Information sharing across incompatible sensor systems

The concept of adapting social media technologies is introduced as a means of achieving information sharing across incompatible sensor systems. Historical examples of interoperability as an underlying principle in loosely-coupled systems is compared and contrasted with corresponding tightly-coupled integrated systems. Examples of ad hoc information sharing solutions based on Web 2.0 social networks, mashups, blogs, wikis, and data tags are presented and discussed. The underlying technologies of these solutions are isolated and defined, and Sensorpedia is presented as a formalized application for implementing sensor information sharing for enterprises with incompatible sensor systems.

Robopedia: Leveraging Sensorpedia for web-enabled robot control

There is a growing interest in building Internet-scale sensor networks that integrate sensors from around the world into a single unified system. In contrast, robotics application development has primarily focused on building specialized systems. These specialized systems take scalability and reliability into consideration, but generally neglect exploring the key components required to build a large scale system. Integrating robotic applications with Internet-scale sensor networks will unify specialized robotics applications and provide answers to large scale implementation concerns. We focus on utilizing Internet-scale sensor network technology to construct a framework for unifying robotic systems. Our framework web-enables a surveillance robots sensor observations and provides a web-interface to the robots actuators. This lets robots seamlessly integrate into web applications. In addition, the framework eliminates most prerequisite robotics knowledge, allowing for the creation of general web-based robotics applications. The framework also provides mechanisms to create applications that can interface with any robot. Frameworks such as this one are key to solving large scale mobile robotics implementation problems. We provide an overview of previous Internet-scale sensor networks, Sensorpedia (an ad-hoc Internet-scale sensor network), our framework for integrating robots with Sensorpedia, two applications which illustrate our frameworks ability to support general web-based robotic control, and offer experimental results that illustrate our frameworks scalability, feasibility, and resource requirements.

Final Report: Sensorpedia Phases 1 and 2

Over the past several years, ORNL has been actively involved in research to formalize the engineering principles and best practices behind emerging social media and social networking concepts to solve real-time data sharing problems for national security and defense, public health and safety, environmental and infrastructure awareness, and disaster preparedness and response. Sensorpedia, an ORNL web site, is a practical application of several key social media principles. Dubbed the Wikipedia for sensors, Sensorpedia is currently in limited BETA testing and was selected in 2009 by Federal Computer Week as one of the government s top 10 social networking sites.

Application of Social Media Data to High-Resolution Mapping of a Special Event Population

Society’s increasing participation in social media provides access to new sources of near-real-time data that reflect our activities in space and in time. The ability for users to capture and express their geolocations through their phones’ global positioning system (GPS), or through a particular location’s hashtag or Facebook page, provides an opportunity for modeling spatiotemporal population dynamics. One illustrative application is the modeling of dynamic populations associated with special events such as sporting events. To demonstrate, Twitter posts and Facebook check-ins were collected across a 24 h period for several football game days at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, during the 2013 season. Population distributions for game hours and nongame hours of a typical game day were modeled at a high spatial resolution using the spatiotemporal distributions of the social media data.

Final Report: Sensorpedia Phase 3

This report is a summary of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory s (ORNL s) Phase 3 development of Sensorpedia, a sensor information sharing platform. Sensorpedia is ORNL s Wikipedia for Sensors. The overall goal of Sensorpedia is to enable global scale sensor information sharing for scientific research, national security and defense, public health and safety, emergency preparedness and response, and general community awareness and outreach.

Spatio-temporal conceptual schema development for wide-area sensor networks

A Wide-Area Sensor Network (WASN) is a collection of heterogeneous sensor networks and data repositories spread over a wide geographic area. The diversity of sensor types and the regional differences over which WASNs operate result in semantic interoperability mismatches among sensor data, and a difficulty in agreeing on methods for sensor data access and exchange. We assume that sensors and their associated data have an explicit spatio-temporal basis (or tagging) in their representation. In this paper, we describe a spatio-temporal loosely-coupled federated database model for the WASN data storage problem - that of unifying query and data representation given a heterogeneous WASN - and propose a conceptual schema to ease the problem of integration of sensor data representations. This is a continuing and critical challenge as sensor networks become more ubiquitous and data inter-operation becomes increasing vital for a variety of applications (such as homeland security, transportation, environmental monitoring, etc.). We employ a top-down ontology-driven software development methodology. We use the SNAP/SPAN ontology as a sample framework for the conceptual schema. We compare our methodology of conceptual schema development with a bottom-up entity-oriented schema construction and discuss the differences in the two approaches. A unique contribution is the discussion of deployment experiences to evaluate proposed approaches in the context of a concrete WASN testbed.