This is the abstract of Sensaq’s presentation at the 2018 CUAHSI Biennial Colloquium.
Recent advances in sensor network development have been more technology-oriented and often left out important aspects such as data management thus lowering the ease of sensor network deployment. In addition, multidisciplinary expertise is currently needed to streamline commercially-available environmental monitoring systems and implement a data-from-sensor to storage-and-proper-annotation approach, equipped with data mining techniques for decision making. This is a complex process that involves continuous and often arduous manual data exports and organization, and also is inherently subject to frequent break-downs and human errors. To address these issues, we introduce TranscodX™, a cost-effective solution that promotes the seamless integration of the front-end (field equipment) and the back-end (standard data management) of a sensor network with support for data stewardship. Our hardware solution, which is aware of a standard data management system, is dubbed a transcoder rather than a data logger. The reason is that, not only it is designed to perform the tasks of a data logger, it is also capable of capturing, transcoding, and streaming field observations data and corresponding metadata to an embedded standard data management framework based on the CUAHSI Observations Data Model (ODM) along with the ability to integrate with legacy sensing equipment. Overall, our solution integrates the collection, transmission, management, discovery and delivery into a full stack system designed to support automatic field data streaming into data management system. We are currently planning to engage a group of beta tester that will deploy and test the device under “real-world” conditions before we move to the production phase.