SensorThings API

Short description of the SensorThings API standard

The OGC SensorThings API provides an open, geospatial-enabled and unified way to interconnect the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, data, and applications over the Web. The OGC SensorThings API is an open standard, and that means it is non-proprietary, platform-independent, and perpetual royalty-free. Although it is a new standard, it builds on a rich set of proven-working and widely-adopted open standards, such as the Web protocols and the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards, including the ISO/OGC Observation and Measurement (O&M) data model.

The main difference between the SensorThings API and the OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) is that the SensorThings API is designed specifically for the resource-constrained IoT devices and the Web developer community. As a result, the SensorThings API is lightweight and follows the REST principles, the use of an efficient JSON encoding, the use of MQTT protocol, the use of the flexible OASIS OData protocol and URL conventions.

The Role of SensorThings API in SDDI

Currently, the Sensor Observation Service is in use in the SSD district London QEOP. TUM is already working on setting up the SensorThings API for the sensors used in London QEOP.

Standard Specification

Specification documents: http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sensorthings

Implementations / Products

The following selection of products was made by the SDDI team and includes those implementations which are (or likely will be) used in the SSD project and from which we know that they are compatible with the requirements of the Smart Sustainable Data Infrastructure. Please note that the list is not a complete list of available or suitable SensorThings API implementations. The Open Geospatial Consortium provides a catalog of implementations of their standards which can be found at http://www.opengeospatial.org/resource. Note that also the OGC list is not complete and not necessarily completely up-to-date.