Example PhD

Sensor Web 2.0

Supervisor: Professor A.D. Preece

Keywords: to follow...

The original World Wide Web provided a uniform way for people to access information, by browsing and searching web sites. Later, the Web evolved into a social and collaborative medium ("Web 2.0"), where users became contributors of information as well as consumers of it (e.g. via wikis), able to link different sources of related data together (e.g. via mashups) and to help each other find useful sources (e.g. via tagging). Currently, work is underway to connect sensors to the Web, so they can be more easily and uniformly accessed. For example, a user might use a Web interface to determine what cameras are available in a particular location, and then access live or previously-recorded video or still picture data from them. This resembles "Web 1.0". This topic is about how Web 2.0 ideas might be useful in the next generation of Web-enabled sensor systems. There are many possible questions here, including: How to support multiple users (possibly with different tasks) to share the same sensors (e.g. two users want to access the same camera, but point it in different directions)? How to support the linking of human-provided information with data from sensors (e.g. combine an eyewitness text report with an image from a camera)? How to allow users to tag or recommend sensors (e.g. to identify useful or high-quality information feeds)?

• some demos of the current generation of Web-enabled sensor systems
• Pachube: an early view of the next generation of the sensor web
• a poster from one of my current PhD students illustrating this kind of project

Key Skills/Background: to follow...

Contact: Professor A.D. Preece to discuss this research topic.