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SensorMap: Browsing the Physical World in Real-Time

Time: 00:58 EST/05:58 GMT | News Source: Microsoft | Posted By: Kenneth van Surksum

Geo-centric web interfaces such as Windows Live Maps (also known as Windows Live Local, based on the Microsoft Virtual Earth technology at http://local.live.com) and Google Maps (see http://maps.google.com) are useful for visualizing spatially and geographically related data such as locations, neighborhoods, weather, traffic, etc. Desires to augment these interfaces with additional useful information have led people to create custom applications that overlay their own data on top of browsable maps. Examples of such applications overlay housing information (http://www.housingmaps.com) and crime-rate data (http://www.chicagocrime.org/map/) on Google Maps, locations of vehicles (http://jprestonsystems.2mydns.com/vemap.aspx?name=demoacct2) and pod casters (http://www.podlook.com/map.aspx) on Microsoft Virtual Earth, weather data on custom maps (http://www.wunderground.com), etc. Such applications became possible after Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth published useful APIs to overlay location data on their maps.

We envision publishing and querying real-time data (e.g., from sensors) over such geo-centric web interfaces. Existing solutions, although useful for writing the simple applications mentioned above, have several drawbacks in achieving this vision. First, publishing even a single stream of data as a useful service is a non-trivial task. Much useful data is not being published yet because the data owners do not have enough programming expertise, or publishing it requires too much effort. Second, the existing applications are mutually incompatible. No single map can show both the housing information and the crime-rates in an area. Third, existing solutions do not provide useful primitives such as querying live sensors based on keywords or location and aggregating the results in useful ways.

The SensorMap project at Microsoft Research aims to address these challenges by providing a common platform and set of tools for data owners to easily publish data and for users to make useful queries of the live data sources. The SensorMap platform transparently provides mechanisms to archive and index data, to process queries, and to aggregate and present results on geo-centric web interfaces such as Microsoft Virtual Earth, etc. We believe that such a platform will encourage the community to publish more live data on the Web, and will also encourage users to build more useful services based on it.