Introduction Data and Service Integration Interpretation

SANY D2.3.4 Specification of the Sensor Service Architecture V3 Doc.V3.1 Copyright © 2007-2009 SANY Consortium Page 88 of 233

6.7. Meta-information Approach

6.7.1 Introduction

The approach to describing meta-information within the SANY Architecture is based on the ORCHESTRA meta-information approach, as described in Annex A3 of RM-OA, 2007. According to this approach a conceptual meta-information model, which is a human understandable representation of the meta-information needed, has to be developed for a given purpose. Based on the user requirements see section 4.6, the following purposes for meta-information have been identified: - Data and Service Integration - Interpretation - Discovery - Monitoring - Authentication and authorisation - User profiling - Quality control management

6.7.2 Data and Service Integration

For the purpose of service integration a service has to provide meta-information that describes the service. This meta-information comprises the structure of the implemented interfaces, the descriptions of the operations that can be performed including the descriptions of the parameter and return types, the location of a service instance e.g. its URL or additional characteristics of the service e.g. costs that enable service selection. For the purpose of data integration a service has to expose meta-information regarding the data it provides describing the structure, the location where can it be accessed, geo- spatial information, quality and precision information, measurement unit, measured phenomenon, and the measurement and processing e.g. filtering procedure, among other information.

6.7.3 Interpretation

Meta-information is needed for the explanation and understanding of resources data and services. Resource descriptions shall contain explicit semantic descriptions or pointers to vocabularies dictionaries in order to ensure the self-description of services and data and their semantically correct integration. SANY D2.3.4 Specification of the Sensor Service Architecture V3 Doc.V3.1 Copyright © 2007-2009 SANY Consortium Page 89 of 233

6.7.4 Discovery