Processing of Crowd-sourced Data from an Internet of Floating Things

Sensors incorporated into mobile devices provide unique opportunities to capture detailed environmental information that cannot be readily collected in other ways. We show here how data from networked navigational sensors on leisure vessels can be used to construct unique new datasets, using the example of underwater topography (bathymetry) to demonstrate the approach. Specifically, we describe an end-to-end workflow that involves the collection of large numbers of timestamped (position, depth) measurements from "internet of floating things" devices on leisure vessels; the communication of data to cloud resources, via a specialized protocol capable of dealing with delayed, intermittent, or even disconnected networks; the integration of measurement data into cloud storage; the efficient correction and interpolation of measurements on a cloud computing platform; and the creation of a continuously updated bathymetric database. Our prototype implementation of this workflow leverages the FACE-IT Galaxy workflow engine to integrate network communication and database components with a CUDA-enabled algorithm running in a virtualized cloud environment.