SWE bridge: software interface for plug & work instrument integration into marine observation platforms

Abstract

The integration of sensor systems into marine observation platforms such as gliders, cabled observatories and smart buoys requires a great deal of effort due to the diversity of architectures present in the marine acquisition systems. In the past years important steps have been taken in order to improve both standardization and interoperability, i.e. the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Sensor Web Enablement. This set of standards and protocols provide a well-defined framework to achieve standardized data chains. However a significant gap is still present in the lower-end of the data chain, between the sensor systems and the acquisition platforms. In this work a standards-based architecture to bridge this gap is proposed in order to achieve plug & work, standardized and interoperable acquisition systems