Geo Sensing in a general context

Hello,

as the use of my project is to improve the data management of geo sensor networks, I want to post something about geo sensing in general:

Geo Sensing

Today geo-information technology is a rapidly rising discipline. The data is mostly collected via airbone and orbiting sensors using photogrammetric techniques, but how has it all started? In former times geomatics were known as land surveyors. Land surveying needs a lot of mathematics and physics. The German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) spent about 20 years of his life with establishing a geodetic
coordinate system. Using photogrammetric for collecting geo-data has been started in the nineteenth century. Geo data is the most important requisite for doing research in the field of geoscience and for getting to know Earth-related processes better [4].

For collecting these data, the use of geo sensor networks created a lot of new opportunities in the recent time. Geo sensor networks communicate wirelessly, they are sensor enabled small devices and they can be distributed throughout a geographic environment [5]. So they can be defined as networks that monitor phenomena in a geographic space [6].

Examples for Geo Sensors [1]

Fields of application

Geo sensor networks open a wide range of new possibilities, like the following examples will show. Therefor three application types can be distinguished based on their observation characteristics: [1]

• Terrestrial Ecology Observing Systems
  In these systems continuous monitoring is usual. For example the observation of the growth or the health of plants. In Australia a project was started in 2006 for monitoring the growth circumstances of a nectarine orchard. The orchard had been covered with about 270 sensors and a gateway connected to the internet [1].
 

• Geological Observation Systems
  These systems describe real-time detection applications like a volcano sensor network deployment. For example, the volcano Mount Pinatubo on the island of Luzon in the Philippines erupted on the 15th of June 1991 after about 600 years of dormancy. For observing the volcano scientists are interested in monitoring the mud flow which is the dynamic spatial field in this example. With the help of geo sensor networks they can find out if one of the major tributaries has split or if the mud flow is still expanding [5].
 

• Aquatic Observing Systems
  That group describes geo sensor systems that are mobile or attached to mobile objects. Mobile objects can for example be cars, animals or ocean buoys. Also tsunami early warning systems or coastal and ocean observation systems belong to that group [1].

Bibliography

[1] Silvia Nittel. A survey of geosensor networks: Advances in dynamic environmental
monitoring. Sensors, page 15, 2009.
[2] Scott Chacon. Pro Git. Apress, 2009.
[3] William I. Grosky. Senseweb: An infrastructure for shared sensing. Media Impact,
page 6, 2007.
[4] Mathias Lemmens. Geo-information, Technologies, Applications and the Environ-ment. Springer, 2011.
[5] Mike Worboys Matt Duckham, Silvia Nittel. Monitoring dynamic spatial elds
using responsive geosensor networks.