A geographic information system framework for data visualisation in wireless sensor networks

There is an increasing need to effectively and efficiently manage the huge amount of data collected by a wireless sensor network WSN. Geographic information system GIS turns out to be a desirable solution to address this problem by archiving and presenting data over a large range of time scales and geographical area. We report our initial effort to interconnect our deployed prototype WSN and ArcGIS - a popular GIS to provide an infrastructure for making maps and geographic information available. Specifically, we present the details about converting files in technical data management streaming TDMS format to files utilises by ArcGIS. To enable the real time display of collected sensor data, we further store the collected data in a PostgreSQL database. A GIS application is developed to manage and represent data. Finally, we develop a web based map application for remote researchers to access collected sensor readings.