A Multi-Agent View of the Sensor Web

The rapid growth in sensor and ubiquitous device deployments has resulted in an explosion in the availability of data. The concept of the Sensor Web has provided a web-based information sharing platform to allow different organisations to share their sensor offerings. We compare the Open Geospatial Consortium - Sensor Web Enablement (OGC-SWE) with Multi-Agent System (MAS), and identify the similarities between the concepts. These similarities motivate the adoption of MAS based techniques to address related problems in OGC-SWE. Brokerage facilitators commonly used in MAS, the Yellow Pages Agent and Blackboard Agent, are considered to address service interaction issues identified within OGC-SWE. Furthermore, the use of MAS based reputation mechanisms are explored to address potential trust issues between service providers and consumers in OGC-SWE.