Sensor.Network: An open data exchange for the web of things

Tiny, wireless, sensors embedded in a large number of Internet-capable devices-smart phones, cameras, cars, toys, medical instruments, home appliances and energy meters-can generate an enormous volume of small bits of data such as temperature and humidity readings, GPS co-ordinates and energy usage. The real value of this data lies in its analysis, which can lead to significant insights and actions that enhance the health of our planet and its populations. We have developed a web-based infrastructure called Sensor.Network for storing, sharing, searching, visualizing and analyzing data from heterogeneous devices and facilitating easy interaction amongst devices and end users through an open, REST-based API. This demonstration starts off with a brief walkthrough of the Sensor.Network portal as we describe its data abstractions, APIs and different views, e.g. dashboard view for monitoring the health of different sensor datastreams and their access permissions and map view for geographical search. Next we show the platform's visualization capabilities, in particular LivePlots-interactive plots of different types which can be embedded into web-based applications hosted elsewhere and are rendered using the latest data from our service each time that external webpage is reloaded. We discuss data-centric collaborations and social interactions made possible by features such as tagging, searching and sharing with fine-grained privacy controls. We demonstrate notifications that are automatically generated when sensor data meeting user-specified criteria is inserted. These notifications allow the composition of ?mashups? of heterogeneous sensors and actuators (e.g. a humidity sensor from one vendor controlling a sprinkler system from another). Finally, we present our early explorations into reprogramming and remote management of devices.