Data management for a smart earth: the Swiss NCCR-MICS initiative

The Swiss National Competence Center for Research in mobile Information and Communication Systems (NCCR-MICS or MICS) is one of several research initiatives sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation to promote long term research projects in areas of vital strategic importance for the evolution of science in Switzerland, for the country's economy and for Swiss society. NCCR-MICS covers a wide spectrum of topics in the area of mobile information and communication systems ranging from information theory related to ad-hoc sensor networks to business models for pervasive computing, including network and routing issues, software and application development, and actual deployments of sensor networks (from architecture to geology). In this paper, we briefly present MICS as a whole and discuss in some detail two ambitious projects in the area of data management. The first project, XTream, addresses the whole life cycle of sensor based applications from the acquisition by sensors, aggregation and integration in gateways, storage in databases, generation of events that are relevant to users and applications, up to the subscription and consumption of events in a distributed architecture. The second project is Global Sensor Networks (GSN), which aims at enabling the rapid and efficient publication, sharing and interoperability of heterogeneous sensor data sources over large networks such as the Internet and P2P overlays.