Towards integrated and efficient scientific sensor data processing: a database approach

In this work, we focus on managing scientific environmental data, which are measurement readings collected from wireless sensors. In environmental science applications, raw sensor data often need to be validated, interpolated, aligned and aggregated before being used to construct meaningful result sets. Due to the lack of a system that integrates all the necessary processing steps, scientists often resort to multiple tools to manage and process the data, which can severely affect the efficiency of their work. In this paper, we propose a new data processing framework, HyperGrid, to address the problem. HyperGrid adopts a generic data model and a generic query processing and optimization framework. It offers an integrated environment to store, query, analyze and visualize scientific datasets. The experiments on real query set and data set show that the framework not only introduces little processing overhead, but also provides abundant opportunities to optimize the processing cost and thus significantly enhances the processing efficiency.