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. Although recent applications identified the need to react to real-time information in a time-critical way, research efforts in the field of geospatial Internet of Things in particular have identified substantial gaps in this context, ranging from a lack of standardisation 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