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National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Sensor Web Experiments

Nasa Sensor Webs

Two Columns

SensorWeb Components

For more information contact:Michael Flick
EO-1 Technology Transfer Manager
EO-1 Mission Office
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20771
Phone: 301-286-8146
Fax: 301-286-2840
E-Mail: Michael Flick

NOTE: this web page is a work in progress page.

The following outline basic features of the Nasa SensorWeb:

High Level Sensor Web shown on left. Note that sensors and algorithms are wrapped in web services which can then be orchestrated via workflows and the Campaign Manager. You can down load a larger pdf of this diagram here.

The basic components of SensorWeb are:

      1. Reference architecture as depicted in the drawing above NASA Technology Report (NTR) TBS
      2. Set of web services which wrap each sensor and connects them to the Internet
        1. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards as documented at http://www.opengeospatial.org
          1. Sensor Planning Service (SPS)
          2. Sensor Observations Service (SOS)
          3. Web Notification Service (WNS)
          4. Web Processing Service (WPS)
        2. Web service interfaces implemented in a RESTful style (reference TBS)
        3. Can include space-based, airborne and terrestrial sensors
      3. Cross domain generic scripting language to orchestrate the web services which are compliant with a set of international standards, Workflow Management Consortium  (WfMC) as documented at: http:www.wfmc.org/
      4. Campaign Manager 1.0 – (NASA Technology Report submitted TBS)
        1. Enables manual triggering of sensors from simple user interface
        2. Interacts with SPS to determine sensor availability and also triggers SPS to actually task sensor
        3. Compatible with WfMC compliant workflows
        4. Makes use of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds with Web 2.0 standards
        5. Has Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) embedded– in prototype phase
      5. Campaign Manager 1.0 Application Processing Interface (API) Client – (NTR 5027514) - Enables remote control of Campaign Manager via API
      6. Identity Management Service – (NTR submitted TBS)
        1. Authenticates users over an open network via Open ID 2 factor software
        2. Authenticates scripts over an open network via Open ID 2 factor software
      7. OGC Publish/Subscribe (OPS) alerts is an enhancement to WNS which provides a publish/subscribe interface to users to enable them to subscribe for notifications when data products are ready.  This is not part of the core OGC SWE standards at this time.
      8.  GeoTorrent distribution service is an enhanced service to distribute data products which enlists other servers to assist in distributing large data products and thus provides an elastic surge capacity when there is a heavy request stream from users. (NTR to be submitted  TBS.

Note that five of the components in figure 1 which are outlined in red form the basic SensorWeb toolbox that was created by NASA and which augment the international standards and dovetail with the OGC specified software components to enable SensorWebs.  The five components are claimed as NASA intellectual property, but will be available as open source software.

The use of the SensorWeb toolbox along with the generic SensorWebs software components transforms space-based sensor missions from operator driven to user driven missions.  Missions begin taking on a “do-it-yourself” look and feel which results in much greater flexibility, greater user access at much reduced cost.   Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) uses these components to enable 20 user organizations (as of 10-1-10) to directly task EO-1.  Due to NASA policy, a flight operations team member still moderates the requests to approve task requests prior to uplink although all management and sorting are done autonomously by sensorweb software.