Interoperability in Marine Sensor Networks through SWE Services: The RITMARE Experience

The rapid growth and development in different fields related to sensors has, together with the huge in-crease of devices due to the decrease of device costs, led to a shift from traditional monitoring, where the data collected is not subject to any management actions, to sensor/processing networks, where in the life cycle more stages are devoted to make the data accessible. Data integration is the first step in advanced environmental monitoring, but assuring that heterogeneous systems can interoperate is still a challenge. The Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative defines a framework to address this issue, offering a set of standard models and interfaces to improve sensor interoperability and to face quality issues in the reliability of sensors. The need for seamless access to observations from marine sensors has been the focus of several research projects. This chapter presents the actions taken in the development of the Spatial Data Infrastructure for project RITMARE to ease the adoption of SWE within the Italian marine community overcoming the main constraints in SWE adoption.