Geospatial IoT - the Need for Event-Driven Architectures in Contemporary Spatial Data Infrastructures

The nature of contemporary spatial data infrastructures lies in the provision of geospatial information in an on-demand fashion. Though recent applications identified the need to react to real-time information in a time-critical way. In particular, research efforts in the field of geospatial Internet of Things have identified substantial gaps in this context, ranging from a lack of standardization for event-based architectures to the meaningful handling of real-time information as ”events”. This manuscript presents work in the field of event-driven architectures as part of spatial data infrastructures with a particular focus on sensor networks and the devices capturing in-situ measurements. The current landscape of spatial data infrastructures is outlined and used as the basis for identifying existing gaps that retain certain geospatial applications from using real-time information. We present a selection of approaches — developed in different research projects — to overcome these gaps. Being designed for specific application domains, these approaches share commonalities as well as orthogonal solutions and can build the foundation of an overall event-driven spatial data infrastructure.JRC.B.6-Digital Econom