Posted by TomRose on December 13, 2006 under Sensor | 
I found Grady Booch’s comments on Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems interesting. There is also an open source implementation called Open JAUS and some additional notes from a college course on the subject Unmanned Systems Course .
The emergence of frameworks like this is good, although there are so many frameworks and standards with overlap, interoperability will be challenging for some time.
I have not reviewed JAUS in any detail yet, and from first glance I see overlap with the Global Sensor Network from the GIS community for sensor acquisition. However, even if there is no overlap, considerable effort is required to understand how components and large systems can be designed to interoperate over the variety of standards.
On the subject of systems design, some focus on system level design standards is also in the works with the Rosetta project operating under the IEEE DASC Study Group.
Tom
Posted by TomRose on August 23, 2006 under RFID, Sensor |
I was looking at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web services over a year ago, and although they had some emerging ideas, it did not seem cohesive at the time. However, a colleague in Australia’s national science agency noted he was looking over the OGC specifications, so I took another look. I was pleasantly surprised to see they have made significant progress and have released specifications for public review regarding a global sensor network.
Here is a video of the demo for the phase 3 work that completed last year.
EPCglobal has been the global standards organization for RFID hardware, RF, and software interoperability protocols. Although they have great success in hardware and RF, the software interoperability standards have been slow to emerge for public review. The reason I mention this about RFID is I believe that RFID readers are just another type of sensor. Also RFID application authors are slowly realizing that geospatial information will be required to better utilize RFID event information. I suspect the OGC sensor standards will have much greater adoption than a niche technology like RFID, and so hopefully the two industries will collide.
The OGC Sensor Web working group website contains the latest drafts of the specifications.
When we talk about Web 2.0, I envision more services like sensor nets and the applications that utilize them. When we start to put interoperability standards in place like Sensor Web from OGC, combine it with emerging networking technology like Zigbee, WiMax, and Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), then things start to get exciting.
Cheers,
Tom