Envirocloud: share your perception on environment.

Availability of Environmental data is crucial in environmental management and conservation. Currently a
large quantum of man power (volunteered or assigned) and sensors are deployed for procuring that. But
due to its inclined variability in procurement objectives, mode of storage and publishing that data, it
severely adjusts the full potential of those efforts. Hindrance in interoperability, delayed knowledge
generation and informed decisions making are the some of the resultant of that adjustment. Sensor web
concept is considered as better way to reduce this hindrance. It basically envisages reducing the gap
between physical-digital worlds. It create a widely accessible spatial data infrastructure of environment by
making web of varies sensors and sensor networks deployed to monitor the environment with different
objectives and specification. The main aim of the present project is to develop a web based application,
which can provide a facility to receive real time environmental data from citizen scientists possessing the
least available mobile information technology. Thus it aims to create a data repository of georeferenced
real time environment data collected by volunteers.

As a pilot project the area of interest of the web application was delimited to SACON campus,
Coimbatore, India. A geocoded data table of the area of interest is created using Google earth. The web
application was developed using XAMPP free and open source web server solution package.
Commercial SMSEnabler was used as an sms gateway software. Which receives the SMS through an 3G
modem and routed it to Apache HTTP server of XAMPP. The PHP script was executed for storing the
routed SMS into an database in MySQL. Server side script was executed to process the recived
geocoded comprising SMS. It was then subject to call the geocoded table imported into the database. By
this SMS message comprising an occurrence of animal or event was pointed into the map of area of
interest using Google Maps Javascript API V3.

At present the web applications Envirocloud has potential usability in retrieving the geocoded
environmental observations, curate and publish the same. It is presumed that by integrating the SWE
standards, the application can be extended as a tool for synchronized citizen scientist based environmental
monitoring initiatives, early warning system in men animal conflict regions, as an platform for integrating
volunteered sensors such as climate stations and personal sensor networks to publish it in internet.