Privacy needs to be ensured for data about human activities and, depending on the application, certain levels or reliability and accuracy need to be achieved to www.selleckchem.com/products/Bicalutamide(Casodex).html be useful.Figure 1.A multi level view of a sensor web.During the workshop the following general issues were raised concerning the current status of sensor web research:The definition of sensors and sensor webs is very broad;it covers a very broad area of research;involving many scales and extremes;involving many domains;and is currently mainly technology driven.Many of these issues are reflected in the 11 papers of this special issue and the proceedings of the workshop.

Sensors and sensor webs are encountered in a broad range of applications Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries varying from specialized in-situ sensors capable of collecting specific point based measurements [3], to mobile sensors capable of collecting data about spatial-temporal parameters [4�C6], to remote sensing sensors mounted on airplanes and satellites able to collect multifaceted information about large geographical areas at the same time [7]. At the same time, however, many of the current sensor webs are defined mainly to function as a dedicated and stand alone network. The need for better integration of sensors and sensor webs is recognized. Concepts and techniques on metadata [2], data structures and languages [8] are raised. Also discovery mechanisms [9] and the connection with geo-data infrastructures are recognized Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries as being important.Research directionsResearch about sensors and sensor webs might be categorized into three rather broadly defined areas of application.

The first area aims at the development of sensor webs in order Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries to better measure known phenomena. The question of how to improve sensors networks in terms of their accuracy, efficiency and intelligence is of importance here. In a technological sense, energy consumption and the robustness of sensor networks is still pending issues. It is not only a matter of better electronics Inhibitors,Modulators,Libraries and batteries but also of more robust, self healing, and fault tolerant network topologies and notification strategies.Secondly, there are the ideas of sensors as a ��sensing skin�� and an ��environmental microscope�� on the Earth. Integration of dynamic and heterogeneous sensor Entinostat webs measuring various aspects, at different scales, and within different domains are key aspects.

Pending issues at the technical levels are the development of ontologies for the interoperability of data and integration of and reasoning about knowledge, and the implementation of standardized, easily accessible sensor webs. Current standards like the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) architecture, the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), or the Sensor Observation Services tech support (SOS) of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) mainly focus on the syntactical aspect of sensor webs.