sMAP: the Simple Measurement and Actuation Profile¶
An enormous amount of physical information; that is, information from and about the world is available today as the cost of communication and instrumentation has fallen. However, making use of that information is still challenging. The information is frequently siloed into proprietary systems, available only in batch, fragmentary, and disorganized. The sMAP project aims to change this by making available and usable:
- a specification for transmitting physical data and describing its contents,
- a large set of free and open drivers with communicating with devices using native protocols and transforming it to the sMAP profile, and
- tools for building, organizing, and querying large repositories of physical data.
The core object in sMAP is the timeseries, a single progression of (time, value) tuples. Each timeseries in sMAP is identified by a UUID, and can be tagged with metadata; all grouping of time series occurs using these tags. These objects are exchanged between all components in this ecosystem.