LiveWeb: A sensorweb portal for sensing the world in real-time

A state-of-the-art sensorweb is a global observation system for varied sensory phenomena from the physical world and the cyber world. This paper presents the architecture, design, and application of a sensorweb service portal called the LiveWeb. This portal has been published on the Internet and is used by researchers, students, and also other communities. This system has been used to represent and monitor real-time physical sensor data and cyber activities from ubiquitous sources. LiveWeb meets its goal of providing an efficient and robust sensor information oriented web service, enabled with real-time data representation and notification. Living in the current world with the immense magnitude of information, it is important to keep different communities updated and informed with their context specific data. There are search engines available in the Internet to find relatively static items, but not to observe the events in real-time. In addition, mostly the sensed data and events have meaning only when accompanied with corresponding geographic information. LiveWeb is an effective and efficient sensorweb service, that tries to fulfill the aforementioned requirements. The LiveWeb system consists of three main components: (a) special features of a PHP web application, (b) a Java background processing program, and (c) a database. It is a robust system and is currently running efficiently under the environment of Ubuntu 6.10, Apache 2.0, PHP 5.0, JAVA 1.60, and MySQL 1.6.