Science-Journal visIT: Current insight into our research

In our science-journal visIT we inform you in a concentrated form about current focal topics of our research. Here you can find all issues in digital form (mainly in German language). If you wish, we will be happy to add you to the distribution list for the print edition - you will then receive visIT approx. four times a year free of charge. Simply write an e-mail to: publikationen@iosb.fraunhofer.de

The term »smart city« is becoming increasingly popular not only in the scientific world but also in the public debate. But why should a city become »smart« and what are the technological concepts behind it?

A smart city is about much more than the Digitalization of the administration or digital citizen services such as applying for an ID card. It is about the ability to make »informed decisions« in a city or region based on permanently available, reliable information. The task of a city is to create an infrastructure based on sensor data so that an ecosystem of business ideas and software applications can be developed by as many participants as possible - with clearly defined, sustainable framework conditions for data use and data availability.

In this visIT, we want to consider the topic of smart cities together with open sensor data standards. Here, we focus in particular on geodata and geoservice standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) such as the OGC SensorThings API as an open and unified software framework for connecting sensor devices, data and applications in the Internet of Things.

The guest article by Thomas Paschke (Esri) shows the importance of the SensorThings API for the Esri product family as well, while Dr. Hylke van der Schaaf presents the standard itself and our open source implementation FROST®. Dr. Jürgen Moßgraber explains the further development of the European Environmental Data Directive INSPIRE through the SensorThingsAPI.

This is followed by various application examples for Smart Cities. Carsten Pieper and Harry Fast describe a climate monitoring and warning system for the city of Soest. Carsten Frey and Philipp Hertweck explain the Bauhaus.MobilityLab in Erfurt, a living lab for mobility, logistics and energy.

Finally, Prof. Dr. Peter Bretschneider shows the importance of the Open District Hub e.V. for new energy-generating solutions for neighbourhoods, while Reinhard Herzog presents a crowdsensing project at Lake Constance in the interaction of LoRaWAN and SensorThingsAPI technologies.

How far along are the smart city solutions in your municipality? We hope you enjoy reading our Smart City science-journal and find it inspiring.

Content

The links will take you directly to the corresponding page of the ePaper (in German):

• Sensor data streams in spatial context
  Thomas Paschke
• OGC SensorThings API: sensor data management made easy
  Hylke van der Schaaf, Jürgen Moßgraber
• API4Inspire: Facilitating access to open spatial data via standardised programming interfaces
  Jürgen Moßgraber
• BürgerWOLKE Soest: A high-density real-time climate monitoring and warning system
  Carsten Pieper, Harry Fast
• Bauhaus.MobilityLab
  Carsten Frey, Philipp Hertweck
• Open District Hub (ODH) projects of Fraunhofer IOSB
  Peter Bretschneider
• Crowdsensing experiment at Lake Constance
  Reinhard Herzog

How will we obtain high-quality food for all the people on earth in the future? How can we design agricultural processes in such a way that they also meet the ecological framework conditions? This issue of the visIT theme booklet presents Fraunhofer IOSB's approaches to answering these questions.

The essay forcefully illustrates the need to pursue Digitalization in agriculture in order to achieve a balance in the conflicting goals of the two introductory questions. To this end, technologies are being explored that support farmers across the entire value chain (field, harvest, storage, production, logistics, trade, consumer). New approaches in robotics, sensor technology and data processing make it possible to offer innovative solutions in the complete food chain.

The first contribution deals with the drone-based recording of soil parameters. The measurements of a hyperspectral camera carried by the drone are used to derive area-wide soil parameter maps that can support farmers in individual fertilisation.

The second article presents a smart vision box designed by Fraunhofer IOSB that can be integrated on a harvesting machine and enables targeted harvesting in viticulture. In addition, diseased vines can be distinguished from healthy ones, which increases the quality of the harvest.

The products harvested from the field can then be re-sorted at the delivery stage. The aim here is to remove foreign bodies and also to sort by quality. In the article, this approach is demonstrated using the example of grape sorting - here, for example, fungus-infested berries are detected and rejected.

In the fourth article, approaches to safeguarding the food chain are presented. For this purpose, food transport containers are equipped with integrated temperature, humidity, position and acceleration sensors so that better shelf-life models can be created for temperature-sensitive foods.

Recently, sensors have been used in retail and by end consumers to determine the quality and freshness of food. Thus, on the one hand, a variable price can be determined by the retailer for sale, and on the other hand, end consumers can use the same approaches to check freshness in their own households.

Content

The links will take you directly to the corresponding page of the ePaper (in German):

• Resource-efficient and environmentally sound agriculture through
  Innovation and Digitalization
  Thomas Längle, Robert Gruna
• Hyperspectral sensor technology and drones: An alternative for
  soil assessment of smart agriculture?
  Simon Schreiner
• Optics and image exploitation for digitalization in viticulture
   - “DigiVine“
  Julius Krause
• Simple optimisation of complex sorting algorithms in
  automatic grapevine sorting
  Michael Palmer
• Reducing “food waste“ using new sensor technologies
  Benedikt Fischer
• Capturing labelled data - Using design thinking to add value
  making it visible
  Henning Schulte