Metadata Harvesting and Registration in a Geospatial Sensor Web Registry

A Sensor Web registry acts as a broker in a service-oriented environment to publish and discover Sensor Web resources (e.g. sensors, sensor services, observations, and alerts). The Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW) developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines a standard interface and protocol for publishing and discovering geospatial resources. This article adopts the CSW for the development of a Sensor Web registry. Metadata for Sensor Web resources are registered into the catalogue information model – the ebXML Registry Information Model (ebRIM). In the Sensor Web environment, sensor observations can be available in real-time or near-real-time, and thus metadata registered in CSW need to be updated frequently. This article proposes an incremental harvesting approach, which can harvest the updated metadata efficiently. A prototypical implementation is provided to demonstrate the applicability of the approach.