Functional Integration for the Observation Web

The integration of sensor-based information has been a research topic for many years. International standards, such as the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite of specifications that will soon be released in its second version, have been developed, and major syntactical and structural challenges have been overcome. Solutions for addressing semantic aspects of interoperability have been suggested, but mature applications are still missing. The advent of user generated content for the geospatial domain, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which can be considered as readings of virtual sensors, makes it even more difficult to establish formal systems for the combination of information that is based on heterogeneous sensing methods. This paper proposes a novel approach of integrating conventional sensor information and VGI, which is exploited in the context of detecting forest fire events. In contrast to common logic-based semantic descriptions, we present a formal system using algebraic specifications as a more elegant, illustrative and straight forward solution.