Making the Sensor Observation Service INSPIRE Compliant

The Sensor Observation Service (SOS) [3] provides access to near real-time environmental data, or observations, in a standardized way. Thereby, the SOS offers flexible spatial, temporal, and thematic filtering capabilities that enable clients to query and discover large sources of time series data over the Web. The SOS standard is already in version 2.0 [6] and applied in many projects and organizational infrastructures (see e.g., [4]). The data encoding leveraged by SOS is the Observations & Measurements (O&M) standard, which has been introduced in the INSPIRE data specification through the Guidelines for the use of O&M. O&M data can also be accessed through the Web Feature Service (WFS), which has been incorporated in INSPIRE [2] as an implementation of the INSPIRE Download Service [1]. However, the WFS interface is very generic and not optimized for O&M data access. So, an inclusion of the SOS in the INSPIRE Technical Guidance (TG) is desired. Hence, this work analyses the SOS specification on how it can be enhanced to conform to the implementation rules for INSPIRE download services.