FME and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Observation Service (SOS)

Sensor Observation Service (SOS)

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) implemented the SOS standard
that basically returns sensor and observation data via XML. (yey!)
3 main functions are supported:

1. GetCapabilities - what server provides
2. DescribeSensor - information about a sensor
3. GetObservation - observation data

Naturally with FME all of these functions can be accessed and the data retrieved to any supported GIS and database format.

FME and web services.

There is already a great webinar displaying how, without a single line of code, a variety of web services are accessed and made with FME. In the webinar the observation data is displayed in the Data Inspector (with a background map) and the table view is used to sort the measurement values.
As with all FME webinars, the workspaces are made available.

Demo workspace

IOOS Demo Workspace.

After viewing the webinar, downloading the workspaces and exploring them, I wanted to expand the SOS demo by retrieving the sensor information.
The demo workspace is well annotated and the use of bookmarks is demonstrated.
By the way, did you notice that once you use bookmarks, you actually have your technical design?

Demo workspace +

 In the developed version of the workspace the upper part is the same as in the demo.
I did , however, change the location of the creator and ParameterFetcher, to be able to distinguish between the service functions.

The added parts are far from complicated, and that is actually the beauty of it, with no code and a minimal number of transformers all data can be easily retrieved.


The sensor information retrieved also contains the sensor location (among other things) to be able to share these results I have created this Google map (with FME, naturally...) that shows the location of the stations.
One of my favorite locations is Sand Island, Midway Islands. Does anybody know what species are all those bird chicks..? 

Google Street View