Sensors Tell More than They Sense: Modeling and Reasoning about Sensor Observations for Understanding Weather Events

Devaraju Anusuriya , Kauppinen Tomi

Zusammenfassung

In this paper, we argue that sensors provide a better understanding of geographicevents. They produce observations that reflect the natural events taking place at a particularlocation. The essential part of deriving information about geographic events from sensorobservations is to formalize the relations between them. In this spirit, we develop an ontology tocapture the relations between weather events and properties observed by sensors. A case studyis investigated to illustrate how blizzard events can be formally represented in relation to a set ofatmospheric properties observed by a weather station. We use the historical weather recordsfrom the Canadian Climate Archives database to evaluate our approach. Using the ontologicalstructures, we define and implement rules to reason about blizzard events from hourly weatherobservations. The result includes an interactive timeline illustrating the events. The approach isevaluated in terms of reasoning and querying support against a local use.