Challenges of Sensor Discovery

This chapter addresses the challenges of sensor discovery on the background of the Sensor Web Enablement architecture of the Open Geospatial Consortium. In the first part of the chapter two kinds of sensor discovery are introduced: sensor instance discovery and sensor service discovery. After this, four key challenges are presented: the dynamic structure of sensor networks, the integration of sensor status information, the semantics of the observed phenomena and sensor metadata models as well as metadata harvesting mechanisms. Additionally, a practical solution for sensor discovery is introduced. This solution is integrated into the Sensor Web Enablement architecture and aims at addressing the challenges of sensor discovery.