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Traditional Web search engines offer information from documents in the Web. SMART is about real-time information gathered from the neighbourhoods of the cities we live in. This information is obtained by processing feeds from the physical world of sensors and the virtual world of social networks and Linked Data, turning those into metadata streams and fusing them together into interesting high-level events.
To do so the SMART system needs to be able to sense the neighbourhoods of the cities, and to collect information about them from the cloud for the Linked Data and the social networks. The SMART edge nodes provide exactly this local functionality: Each one senses the pulse of a location by collecting and fusing the information from diverse sensors and networks, such as cameras, microphone array and environmental sensors. The information is used by the SMART Applications, as it is gathered from the different edge nodes via the SMART Search Engine. The SMART system architecture is shown below:
Each edge node collects or produces metadata that are:
- perceived from its physical surroundings as they are sensed by a sensor network,
- filtered from social networks,
- retrieved from the linked data cloud, and,
- inferred by combining (fusing and reasoning) all the above from diverse sources.
To produce, collect and handle those metadata, the edge node components are organised in three layers:
- The Data Input layer: Perceptual components operating on the feeds of sensors, the social network manager operating on data from social networks and the linked data manager operating on linked data.
- The Metadata Handling layer: Formatting the metadata and forwarding them to the edge node database for storage and streaming towards other components.
- The Reasoning layer: Metadata from different streams are fused together to infer the context at the intelligent fusion manager.
The layered architecture of the edge node is shown below:
Sensor data enter the data input layer components of SMART, resulting to metadata that populate the feeds towards the edge node database. The organization of the metadata into feeds is done at the metadata handling layer. Having considered general data standards (XML and JSON), specific data standards (MPEG-7, SensorML and RDF) and multimedia ontologies, the SMART feed representation has been consolidated at two levels:
- The description of the feeds. This description is necessary for registering a feed to the system. It comprises an XML document following our XSD specification.
- The feed contents (metadata). This is necessary for providing metadata to the rest of the SMART system. The metadata are provided as linked data in RDF. The supported RDF formats are both XML and JSON.
Most users are expected to install one edge node. They can connect their node to the SMART search engine's Sandbox maintained by University of Glasgow.
The process is done following these steps:
- First, folllow the instructions for installing the edge node binaries.
- Then, follow the intrauctions for installing data input sources: the Social Network Manager binaries, the public perceptual components (not part of the Egdge Node project), the Multimedia Data Manager and the Linked Data Manager.
- Finally, follow the instructions for installing the Intelligent Fusion Manager binaries.