Stream Feeds — An Abstraction for the World Wide Sensor Web

RFIDs, cell phones, and sensor nodes produce streams of sensor data that help computers monitor, react to, and affect the changing status of the physical world. Our goal in this paper is to allow these data streams to be first-class citizens on the World Wide Web. We present a new Web primitive called stream feeds that extend traditional XML feeds such as blogs and Podcasts to accommodate the large size, high frequency, and real-time nature of sensor streams. We demonstrate that our extensions improve the scalability and efficiency over the traditional model for Web feeds such as blogs and Podcasts, particularly when feeds are being used for in-network data fusion.