A Heterogeneous Access Metamodel for Efficient IoT Remote Sensing Observation Management: Taking Precision Agriculture as an Example

Standard remote sensing observation (RSO) access and formulization is essential to Internet of Things (IoT) data management, such as in precision agriculture (PA). Because of the heterogeneous characteristics and the petabyte data size of RSO, massive remote sensing processing in RSO management has been hampered. Here, we present a heterogeneous access metamodel for efficient RSO management (HAMERM) and verify it in PA. The structure of basic metadata components is defined. A five-tuple metadata structure based on the metaobject facility is designed. HAMERM consists of identification, platform, observation, product, and access, which represent the five aspects of RSO metadata information. In addition, the flatMap/reduceByKey algorithms and the table structure have been proposed under Sensor Web and Geographic Information Science (GIS) techniques. Intensive experiments in Guangdong Province, China are conducted to test the proposed method. Two RSO metadata formulization instances were conducted to examine the ability of sheltering the differences of multisource and heterogeneous RSO. Experiments containing data storage and data soil moisture (SM) mapping were performed. The results suggest that the HAMERM method achieved a performance 30.1 times higher than that of Hadoop and three times higher than that of Spark (stand-alone). Consequently, the proposed HAMERM can be applied to achieve efficient SM mapping within PA, which is helpful for efficient RSO management for the IoT.