OPAL - Open sensor data platform for analysis and semantic processing

Short description of the project

In the in-house research project CrossTEP-OPAL, which started in 2019, Fraunhofer IOSB is developing a web-based platform toolbox for the acquisition, presentation and intelligent analysis of sensor data. The project builds on existing developments from our institute - on FROST®, our implementation of the SensorThings API, for sensor data management, and on WebGenesis®, a framework for generating and supporting web-based information systems, for visualisation and semantic integration. Industry 4.0 know-how (OPC UA), data analysis tools from energy data management (EMS-EDM PROPHET®) and algorithms for activity recognition from video footage are also incorporated.

Exemplary use cases

The current project is structured around exemplary use cases from the areas of intelligent video evaluation, energy consumption prediction, environmental data collection and evaluation, and outdoor localisation. These use cases represent hypothetical - but realistic - customer projects from the field of Data Engineering and Data Science, so they have a high demand for data integration, management and evaluation. For this purpose, we first integrated the available sensors and visualised their measurements - where there was no suitable form of visualisation, we developed new ones, such as the heat map shown below. In the second year of the project, we are now dedicating ourselves to setting up a framework for integrating algorithms to perform customised data analyses and gain deeper insights from the data collected.

Project outcome

With the help of the finished toolbox, web-based monitoring, reporting and data analysis for a wide variety of sensors will be easy to implement. The goal is to establish a data science pipeline at Fraunhofer IOSB so that all projects in which sensor data play an important role - whether smart city applications or environmental information systems, whether for controlling energy systems or increasing public safety - can be implemented quickly and cost-effectively in the future on the basis of the developments of CrossTEP-OPAL.