STA Viewers

[KathiSchleidt]

Dear all,

a short note on an exciting new development. We've recently learned of the creation of a STA Plugin for QGIS created by colleagues from the Dedagroup in Italy. This plugin is currently tailored to air quality, but works across various other STA endpoints tested. The SW is open source, and the developers are eager to welcome additional collaborators!

I see this as a perfect complement to the STAM viewer for web-based applications.

:)

Kathi

SensorThings API QGIS plugin

In the city of Ferrara (Italy) Dedagroup Public Services and other partners are involved in the AIR-BREAK project to implement a set of geo-ICT tools for supporting an improved identification and monitoring of urban air quality (see also [0]).

Different datasets about Air Quality (AQ) from heterogeneous sources have been already interconnected and integrated in the Spatial Data Infrastructure of the Municipality of Ferrara, based on (geo)standard protocols for data interchange sourced by:

• 173 authoritative AQ monitoring stations from 3 regional environmental agencies, ARPAE Emilia-Romagna (52), ARPA Veneto (33) and ARPA Lombardia (88), for their own whole regional areas;
• 2 private AQ monitoring stations managed by private companies located in Ferrara;
• 14 new AQ monitoring stations installed by Lab Service Analytica (project partner) in the territory of Ferrara

For integrating and sharing dynamic hourly data about air quality and other themes, we adopted the OGC Sensor Things APIs (STA) as the reference standard protocol [1], based on the OGC/ISO 19156:2011 [2] and providing an open and unified framework to interconnect IoT sensing devices, data, and applications over the Web.

FROST solution (FRaunhofer Opensource SensorThings-Server) [3] has been deployed in the GIS server farm of the Municipality of Ferrara to complement Geoserver and other technologies already providing services for viewing/accessing data based on OGC standards.

To further provide accessibility to GIS users within Municipality of Ferrara, University and other organizations, Dedagroup Public Services also implemented a plugin enabling QGIS desktop software to access dynamic data from SensorThings API endpoints.

The plugin is available at https://github.com/AirBreak-UIA/SensorThingsAPI_QGIS-plugin

Among the final objectives of AIR BREAK project, the implementation of a standard-based Air Quality Data Infrastructure focuses on:

1. creating a bi-lateral and cooperative communication systems between authorities and citizens about air quality and its perception;
2. defining and implementing a multi-stakeholder Data Infrastructure on Air Quality to integrate existing/heterogeneous/dynamic data from both authoritative sources and crowdsourced by citizens (Rete di Monitoraggio Ambientale Partecipativo [4]);
3. providing such dynamic air quality data to local authorities involved monitoring (i.e. Municipality of Ferrara, ARPAE, Regione Emilia-Romagna) and to citizens, through standard APIs (STA) and with open licenses through the upcoming open data portal of Ferrara (June 2022);
4. testing and validating innovative solutions for air quality monitoring using in-situ IoT sensors and satellite remote sensing (e.g. Copernicus)

References:

[0] https://www.uia-initiative.eu/en/news/air-break-journal-nr-1

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SensorThings_API

[2] https://www.iso.org/standard/32574.html

[3] https://github.com/FraunhoferIOSB/FROST-Server

[4] https://rmap.cc/