istSOS4Things - FAIR & Open Source IoT platform for Open Science

Sensor-based environmental monitoring is increasingly vital for research and decision-making, yet the current web standards used to share these data streams, such as the OGC SensorThings API (STA), do not fully support scientific reproducibility, data provenance, or data sovereignty. To meet reproducibility requirements, researchers often resort to downloading and archiving static snapshots of evolving time-series datasets, leading to unnecessary data duplication, loss of linkage with live sources, and inefficient data management.

IstSOS4Things (www.istsos.org) aims to close this critical gap by extending the STA standard with versioning and time-travel capabilities, enabling data auditing and persistent, immutable access to historical states of sensor observations through persistent URL. Much like Git allows access to past versions of code, the proposed STA-traveltime extension let users cite, query and extract the exact dataset used in a study, even years later.

This breakthrough addresses a long-standing limitation of geospatial web services and paves the way for fully FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and reproducible research. In parallel, istSOS4Things introduces mechanisms for fine-grained access control embedded within the web service itself, empowering researchers and institutions to share their data in accordance with the principle of “as open as possible, as closed as necessary.” This helps overcome common hesitations for data sharing, ensuring trust, transparency, and legal compliance.