Pattern:Sensors Pattern

Description

An English description of the definition (what distinguishes this sense of the term?).

The Sensors Pattern is included in this document due to the importance of data collection for all manner of city services. Data collection efforts take various forms – whether through manual canvassing or the use of sensors. With a growing access to the Internet of Things, data from available sensors will continue to expand, likely to include observations about persons, vehicles, and so on. It is important to not only capture the collected data, but the source of the observations. The representation of sensors shall conform to the ontology specified in The W3C Recommendation “The SSN (Semantic Sensor Network) Ontology” [6]. It is included in its entirety with the prefix ‘ssn’. The W3C standard ontology for sensors and their observations, the SSN (Semantic Sensor Network) Ontology, accessed from http://www.w3.org/ns/ssn/ shall be used in the context of this document.

Key Concepts and Classes

The SSN Ontology does not make any commitments as to whether instances of ssn:Property should be generic (e.g. ex:temperature) or specific to the feature of interest (e.g. ex:mybodytemperature). Current documentation suggests that this is a choice for the modeler. On the other hand, the City Data Model prescribes a definition of instances of ssn:Property at a generic level; this will enable the querying of sensors that observe some property (e.g. vehicle presence) regardless of the location. This is useful as there can be different kinds of sensors that observe the same properties (e.g. loop detectors vs Bluetooth sensors) and while they might not share the exact feature of interest, they can be in close enough proximity to be related and so a property indicating their similarity is desirable.

Status

Pending Approval

Supplementary Figures

Figure	Caption