Unified Pandemic Tracking System Based on Open Geospatial Consortium SensorThings API
Robinson Paniagua, Rdawa Sultan, Ahmed Refaey
TL;DR
The paper addresses the need for transparent, real-time pandemic tracking by leveraging open geospatial standards for interoperable IoT data exchange. It analyzes the Open Geospatial Consortium SensorThings API (SAT) and compares it with the SOS-based approach using two open-source servers (FROST-Server and istSOS) deployed on AWS to evaluate latency, payload, and CPU metrics. Results show that SAT-based deployment via FROST-Server generally yields lower latency and smaller data payloads than SOS-based istSOS, though SOS provides interactive GUI features that aid usability. The work demonstrates a feasible path toward a globally interoperable, edge-enabled pandemic tracking system, highlighting the trade-offs between API-driven data exchange and GUI-centric sensor data management.
Abstract
With the current nations struggling to track the pandemic's trajectories. There has been a lack of transparency or real-live data streaming for pandemic cases and symptoms. This phenomenon has led to a rapid and uncontrolled spread of these deadly pandemics. One of the main issues in creating a global pandemic tracking system is the lack of standardization of communications protocols and the deployment of Internet-of-Things (IoT) device sensors. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed several sensor web Enablement standards that allow the expeditious deployment of communications protocols within IoT devices and other sensor devices like the OGC SensorThings application programming interface (API). In this paper, to address this issue, we outline the interoperability challenge and provide a qualitative and quantitative study of the OGC SensorThings API's deployment and its respective server. The OGC SensorThings API is developed to provide data exchange services between sensors and their observations. The OGC SensorThings API would play a primary and essential role in creating an automated pandemic tracking system. This API would reduce the deployment of any set of sensors and provide real-time data tracking. Accordingly, global health organizations would react expeditiously and concentrate their efforts on high infection rates.