With 50% of the U.S. population living within 100 km of the coast, human populations significantly impacting coastal zones (e.g., eutrophication), and coastal environments significantly impacting human activities (e.g., Hurricane Katrina), there is a critical need for smart coastal environmental sensor networks to support planning, sustainable coastal development, effective coastal hazard warning and mitigation, and appropriate public use of coastal resources.  The Boston Environmental Area Coastal Observation Network (BEACON) research project is creating an integrated environmental sensor network testbed in Boston Harbor that includes novel sensor development (e.g., bacterial water quality, coastal inundation), optimized sensor networking (e.g., telemetry, power, bandwidth), predictive modeling (e.g., circulation, GIS), and cyber-infrastructure (e.g., data management, standards, visualization).  The sensor network testbed to be developed crosses steep gradients from urban to rural, land to ocean, and natural to developed environments.  Specific objectives for this research project include:  (a) developing “smart” sensor networks for observing complex interactions of coastal systems including “hotspots and hot moments,” in the Neponset River Watershed, Neponset Estuary, and Boston Harbor; (b) developing discrete and agent-based models to rapidly analyze and visualize complex and non-continuous datastreams; and (c) developing and test new environmental sensors and evaluating the potential to transfer the sensor network technology to commercial markets.
More >>

We have developed a semantic data validation tool that is capable of observing incoming realtime sensor data and performing reasoning against a set of rules specific to the scientific domain to which the data belongs. Our software solution can produce a variety of different outcomes when a data anomaly or unexpected event is detected, ranging from simple flagging of data points, to data augmentation, to validation of proposed hypotheses that could explain the phenomenon. Hosted on the Jena Semantic Web Framework, the tool is completely domain-agnostic and is made domainaware by reference to an ontology and Knowledge Base (KB) that together describe the key resources of the system being observed.
More >>