In many smart city projects, multiple stakeholders and companies are involved who use their own sensors and IoT devices. These devices generally belong to different platforms and have different data formats and APIs. In order to work within a common operational framework, sensor web infrastructures play a key role in providing interoperability between heterogeneous sensor platforms and observations. However, it is unlikely that all stakeholders would be willing to inject their proprietary data into a centralized third-party data storage in the sensor web. The key requirement in such distributed environment is to access diverse sensor and IoT platforms in easy and interoperable ways.

InterSensor Service is a lightweight web service for managing heterogeneous sensor and IoT observations in standardized ways. It allows users to connect to multiple sensor and IoT platforms, databases and basic external files. The observations can easily be retrieved without worrying about data storage and the multitude of different APIs.

At the same time, the observations can be encoded according to the standardized external interfaces from the OGC Sensor Web Enablement. This allows to query and visualize heterogeneous observations in a common framework.