24 February 2014 – The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) hasapproved the OGC SensorModel Language (SensorML) 2.0 Encoding Standard.  SensorML 2.0 provides a standard encoding fordescribing sensors (“things that measure”), actuators (“thingsthat act”), and processors (“things that calculate”). SensorMLis part of the award-winningOGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite of standards that have been implemented in satellitemission planning, monitoring and alerting, and intelligent cities and buildingsaround the world.

Because SWE standards are open standards based on open and universallyaccepted standards for the Internet and web, and for spatial location, they arefoundational standards for communicating with sensors, actuators and processorswhose location matters. They are a key enabler for the Internet of Things.

SensorML 2.0 includes a number of changes to the previousversion 1.0.1, which was approved in 2007. SensorML 2.0 includes new orimproved features, including:

  • Support for using external schemas to describe sensorproperties
  • Better-defined support for positions and dynamic state(e.g. location, orientation, velocity, and acceleration)
  • Better support for inheritance, allowing for more compactdescriptions of deployed devices and processes
  • Direct access to real-time values and data streams
  • Better support for multiplexed data streaming (i.e.streams with disparate message types).

The online documentation includes a large collection of programmingexamples.

Efforts are also underway to take advantage of thecomplementary role that SensorML 2.0 can play with the OGC City GeographyMarkup Language (CityGML) Encoding Standard and the candidate OGC standard IndoorGML. Also, the OGC SensorWeb for IoT (SWIOT) Standards Working Group (SWG) seeks to make observations captured by IoT devices easilyavailable to applications and users through data aggregation portals. 

All OGC standards are free and publicly available. The OGCSensorML 2.0 Encoding Standard can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sensorml.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 470companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universitiesparticipating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatialstandards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that”geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, andmainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatialinformation and services accessible and useful with any application that needsto be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.

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