Sensor Data as a Service -- A Federated Platform for Mobile Data-centric Service Development and Sharing

The Internet of Things (IoT) offers the promise of integrating the digital world of the Internet with the physical world in which we live. But realizing this promise necessitates a systematic approach to integrating the sensors, actuators, and information on which they operate into the Internet we know today. This paper reports the design and development of an open community-oriented platform aiming to support federated sensor data as a service, featuring interoperability and reusability of heterogeneous sensor data and data services. The concepts of virtual sensors and virtual devices are identified as central autonomic units to model scalable and context-aware configurable/reconfigurable sensor data and services. The decoupling of the storage and management of sensor data and platform-oriented metadata enables the handling of both discrete and streaming sensor data. A cloud computing-empowered prototyping system has been established as a proof of concept to host smart community-oriented sensor data and services.