OpenSense
Wireless sensor networks and publishing of sensor data on the Internet bear the potential to substantially increase public awareness and involvement in environmental sustainability. These technologies enable capturing sensor data by involving public authorities and the general public and making real-time information on environmental conditions available to a wide public. Air pollution monitoring in urban areas is a prime example of such an application as common air pollutants have direct effect on the human health. However, bringing the vision of public involvement in environmental monitoring to a reality poses today substantial technical challenges for the communication and information systems infrastructure, to scale up from isolated well controlled systems to an open and scalable infrastructure where many nano-scale sensors generate terabytes of data. Challenges that are not well addressed today are (1) dealing with the heterogeneity and widely varying characteristics of the sensor equipment, measurements and data analysis (2) supporting and exploiting mobility of sensors and (3) involving the community in a trusted, fair and transparent manner into the monitoring activity.
More about OpenSense can be found on the project website.