[use cases] Community-based Flood Monitoring

Please find below my contribution for the use case discussion.

All the best,

Edoardo


Community-based Flood Monitoring

What is the user motivation for the use case?
Flood warning systems are often based on blanket reports from local authorities and environment agencies, which are based on, limited resources and a small number of expensive, professional sensors.

If John wants to determine if his property will be affected by water, it needs access to flooding information at a street level and understand how connected water streams might effect the water level near his property. Such process requires higher resolution data on the streams, groundwater and complex basins riddling cities and villages.

John is part of a community-based initiative where members provide access to water level data by radio connected low cost sensors in their properties. It is very important for John to understand the quality of the information it has access too in order to make better decisions about what flood defences to use.

Privacy is also am important factor as sensors could be deployed in areas of low-density population and John does not want that other people can infer what kind of flood damages his property might have ensued.

How does this translate to a technical description?
- Device installation: Members of the community need to install water-level monitoring sensors on their property;
- Data transmission: Data from the sensors need to be reliably transmitted to cloud services;
- Data transformation: Data streams need to be manipulated and transformed in real time;
- Decision Making: Resulting data streams should be used for decision making (e.g. through visualisation tools or other applications);
- Network Monitoring: Data quality indicators should be used for monitoring the sensor network.

What application domains are related (e.g. referring to the taxonomy)?
- main: smart cities / other utilities / monitoring water levels for flood warnings

What interaction pattern with or btw things can be observed?
- Resource Description: In the system, the data has to be enriched with some meta-information (e.g. timestamp, location, data quality indicators, provenance, etc.).
- Thing registration: sensors and gateways are registered with services in the cloud.
- Data subscription: agents subscribe to data streams generated by devices in the sensor network or other external data sources.
- Data transformation: agents transform incoming data streams and generate outgoing data streams.
- Quality Assessment: Information quality indicators associated with things are used by the technical team to monitor the operation of the sensor network
- Automated Decision Making: Automated decisions can be made based on the current status of things e.g. activate flood defences.

Which aspects are not considered?
- Lifecycle of devices, services and applications
- Discovery of devices and related data sources