Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researchers are working on an emergency sensor system that would give first responders information about radiation, chemical and biological agent events across the country in near real time.
SensorPedia, a writeable Web site adopts the underlying technology of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia collaboratively written by readers, as a model to gather information from multiple diverse sites. That’s cool because while scores of sensors are being deployed around the nation, these sensor networks are not designed to be interoperable, says Bryan Gorman of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. Today’s systems of sensors that can detect radiation, chemicals and biological agents are of limited use because there is no clear-cut standard to let systems share data. So rather than cram another standard down everyone’s throat, the Wikipepdia technology is what the researchers are adopting.
SensorPedia, however, is different from Wikipedia in three ways. The ORNL implementation of SensorPedia will link to near-real-time data, which will provide streaming of data; SensorPedia will support interactive “mashups” of information; and only approved personnel will be authorized to write to the SensorPedia Web site. SensorPedia will be used initially within the federal government. The site will be hosted on a wiki-enabled ORNL server that can support the established credentialing and authentication control. Ultimately, SensorPedia could play a key role in the never-ending mission to detect and respond to emergent threats, researchers said.
ORNL has experience in this sort of thing. Its SensorNet project explored ways of gathering information from computers about potential threats. SensorNet computers would evaluate chemical releases and track the exposure risks to populations in their path, giving officials the information necessary to make decisions on evacuations and the medical response to incidents.
