Data Management in the Worldwide Sensor Web

Advances in hardware and miniaturization technologies have led to a rapid increase in the number of large-scale sensor network deployments around the world, bringing us closer to the vision of a worldwide sensor web. Exploiting the sensor web to its full potential, however, raises several hard data management challenges. Addressing these challenges requires a concerted multidisciplinary effort encompassing many computer science fields. This article outlines some of the key data management challenges of a worldwide sensor web. It also presents recent advances in data management research that aim to address these challenges. Hopefully, the scientific, ubiquitous computing, and sensor network communities will adopt some of these solutions for managing their data. The article also attempts to bring many of the remaining open issues to the attention of the database community. This article is part of a special issue on Building a Sensor-Rich World.