Sens-ation: A Service-Oriented Platform for Developing Sensor-Based Infrastructures

In today’s information society the vast technical progress and the sinking cost of information and communication technology provide new opportunities for information supply, and new technical support for communication and cooperation over distance. These trends also entail challenges such as supplying information that is adequate for a particular person in a specific situation as well as managing communication among geographically distributed parties efficiently. Context-aware systems that use sensors in order to analyse their environment and to adapt their behaviour. Yet, adequate tools for developing sensor-based infrastructures are missing. We have designed and developed Sens-ation, an open and generic service-oriented platform, which provides powerful, yet easy-to-use, tools to software developers who want to develop context-aware, sensor-based infrastructures. The service-oriented paradigm of Sens-ation enables standardised communication within individual infrastructures, between infrastructures and their sensors, but also among distributed infrastructures. On a whole, Sens-ation facilitates the development allowing developers to concentrate on the semantics of their infrastructures, and to develop innovative concepts and implementations of context-aware systems