An Efficient Method for Near-Real-Time On-Demand Retrieval of Remote Sensing Observations

Recent advances in sensor web geospatial data capture, have led to the generation of large numbers of real-time or near-real-time observations and measurements. As the magnitude of Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Sensor Observation Service (SOS) becomes increasingly large, a major problem is how to make fast and fully robust use of such data services in a Web-ready sensors environment. A new method is proposed, Real-time Coverage Service (RCS), for serving observational data based on the integration of WCS and SOS. The RCS method hides the complexity of a series of information models and service interfaces in the Earth Observation (EO) and Sensor Web world, allowing near-real-time on-demand access to geospatial observations. The core components-dynamical schema transformer and automatic information extractor-are designed and implemented based on service middleware technology. The Observations & Measurements (O&M) schema of SOS and coverage schema of WCS are matched by schema transformer dynamically. The coverage information is extracted from a SOS “GetObservation” operation by an information extractor and served by a WCS “GetCoverage” operation on-demand. Experiments on the feasibility of Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) Hyperion data retrieval for the RCS method and OGC Sensor Web SOS method were conducted and their efficiency compared. The results show that the proposed RCS has architecture that is more robust and performs more efficiently than the SOS method.