A unified framework to semantically characterize functional and geographic properties of sensors

Nowadays sensors and sensor networks are deployed in many application domains to accomplish well defined, field-oriented monitoring tasks. Very often, sensors which have been deployed to monitor specific contexts are required to interoperate to third-party sensor systems to serve more complex and demanding monitoring tasks. The heterogeneity of sensor platforms offered by vendors raises the need for a common framework where sensors can be regarded as vendoragnostic services with well defined and open functionality. To this end, this work proposes a semantic approach to foster the characterization of heterogeneous sensors. Also, an effort is made to semantically characterize the geographic context where sensors may be deployed, in a way that in the resulting semantic framework functional and geographic properties of sensors may be combined together. The exploitability of such an idea is then investigated through a practical use case in the domain of civil protection. The implemented scenario shows that the combination of sensors´ functional and geographic properties is useful to the domain´s monitoring purpose.