Database Reference
In-Depth Information
8.1.7 Microsoft SensorMap.
Most of the applications dis-
cussed above are based on location data, which is automatically collected
based on user behavior. The SensorMap project [127] at Microsoft al-
lows for a more general framework in which users can
choose to publish
any kind of sensor data
, with the understanding that such shared knowl-
edge can lead to interesting inferences from the data sets. For example,
the sensor data published by a user could be their location information,
audio or video feeds, or text which is typed on a keyboard. The goal of
the SensorMap project is to store and index the data in a way such that
it is eciently searchable. The application also allows users to index
and cache data, so that users can issue spatio-temporal queries on the
shared data.
The SensorMap project is part of the SenseWeb project, which allows
sharing and exploring of sensor streams over geo-centric interfaces. A
number of key design challenges for managing such sensor streams have
been discussed in [120]. Other key challenges, which are associated with
issues such as the privacy issues involved with continuously collecting
and using the sensors which are only intermittently available is discussed
in [99].
8.2 RFID Technology: The Internet of Things
The general idea of social sensing can also be extended to applica-
tions which use RFID technology to track objects, as opposed to “so-
cial” sensing paradigms, which track people. This technology is also
transformative for social sensing, because of the close relations between
people and objects in many scenarios, and the social inferences, which
may be possible with the use of such tracking technology. The idea is
that radio frequency tags are attached to commercial products or other
objects to be tracked, and these tags do little more than provide their
unique
Electronic Product Code (EPC)
to nearby sensor readers. Thus,
the movements of objects of interest can be identified by appropriate
receivers at checkpoints where the object movement is tracked. Further-
more, these readers can be connected to the internet, where they can
publish the data about the objects, and enable effective search, query-
ing, and indexing of these objects with the use of the semantic web
framework [82].
Animals, commercial products, baggage and other high volume items
are often tracked with the use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
tags. For example, RFID technology has been used to track the move-
ment of large animals such as whales with chips embedded in them.
Such chips may sometimes even have transmitters embedded in them,
