Sensors 2011, 11, 2652-2699; doi:10.3390/s110302652 OPEN ACCESS sensors ISSN 1424-8220 www.mdpi.com/journal/sensors Review New Generation Sensor Web Enablement Arne Bröring 1,2,3,*, Johannes Echterhoff 4, Simon Jirka 3, Ingo Simonis 4, Thomas Everding 1, Christoph Stasch 1, Steve Liang 5 and Rob Lemmens 2 1 Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Weseler Strasse 253, 48151 Muenster, Germany; E-Mails:
[email protected] (T.E.);
[email protected] (C.S.) 2 Faculty ITC, University of Twente, Hengelosestraat 99, 7514 AE Enschede, The Netherlands; E-Mail:
[email protected] (R.L.) 3 52° North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software, Martin-Luther-King-Weg 24, 48155 Muenster, Germany; E-Mail:
[email protected] (S.J.) 4 International Geospatial Services Institute, Werner-Heisenberg-Str. 73, 26723 Emden, Germany; E-Mails:
[email protected] (J.E.);
[email protected] (I.S.) 5 Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada; E-Mail:
[email protected] (S.L.) * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail:
[email protected]; Tel.: +49-251-83-39761; Fax: +49-83-251-39763. Received: 17 January 2011; in revised form: 15 February 2011 / Accepted: 25 February 2011 / Published: 1 March 2011 Abstract: Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth‘s environment, and more will follow in the future. Environmental sensors have improved continuously by becoming smaller, cheaper, and more intelligent. Due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and differing accompanying protocols, integrating diverse sensors into observation systems is not straightforward.