Getting From Here to There May Get Easier

Being able to get from here to there efficiently is one of the real beneficial features of the Web. And SensorMap, an interface which merges location mapping with real-time data, may take finding your way around to a new level.

SensorMap will leave the world of the lab for the world of commerce when it is released to the public on July 17 at Microsoft Research’s Faculty Summit. In a nutshell, SensorMap is a platform for publishing and searching for real-time data to help users get more tightly focused search results. More specifically, SensorMap is an interface of Microsoft Research's SenseWeb data portal.

"You can go to a search engine and search for all the restaurants in Seattle," says Suman Nath, a researcher at Microsoft Research. "But what you can’t do today is to find me all the restaurants in Seattle that have a waiting time of less than 30 minutes. That part is a real-time component, and we want to enable this type of scenario, so that you can search based not just on static data, but also on real-time data."

From the SensorMap perspective, there are two types of data--live data, which changes over time, and metadata that describes the sensor itself and which doesn’t change that much. SensorMap doesn't really care what the source of the data is. For instance, "sensors" might be wireless transmitters placed at various remote sites that broadcast information relevant to the location. The wireless transmitters send local information--such as a restaurant’s table availability or the temperature at a national forest during fire season--to a Web server. To enable this, Microsoft provides the MSR Networked Embedded Sensing Toolkit (MSR Sense), a collection of software tools that allow users to collect, process, archive, and visualize data from a sensor network. The current version contains:

• A reconfigurable microserver execution environment (mSEE)
• A small library implementing signal processing and event detection algorithms
• An extension to Excel 2003 (Senscel) to import, visualize and processing sensor data, and interface to SQL server to archive and retrieve data
• A microserver interaction console (mSIC) for users to configure and control microservers.

Once live real-time data is collected, SensorMap indexes it to make it searchable. A database holds geographically indexed sensor descriptions and works in tandem with a sensor-data publishing Web service and a server-side query processor.

"In our system, we have one central database where we store all the metadata," says Nath. "When you make a query, the query first goes to that central database, and it returns a list of sensors relevant to the query. Another module talks to those sensors directly, gets the live data, processes that data, and sends it back to the user."

Nath goes on to say that "the biggest problem is the query-processing part. And the biggest challenge in this whole space is scalability. If you have thousands of sensors and if you have many, many users, how can we scale efficiently to that? How can we cache data on the back end so we can reuse that data for scaling?"

"What we are trying to do here, " he adds, "is to bring all different types of sensors together. And we’re actually trying to provide more useful things--search based on geographic region or based on keywords. Also, depending on the zoom level of a map, we are trying to aggregate data. If you’re querying temperature sensors statewide, we can provide individual sensor information, but we also can show you the average temperature. That sort of aggregation is absent in other industry applications."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 09:59 AM  Permalink