New sensor-based search engine to be developed

A new project to develop a search enginewhich will draw its results from sensors located in the physical world is being undertaken by computer scientists at the University of Glasgow.

As the internet continues to expand, public access tonet-connected sensors such as cameras and microphone arrays is increasing.

The European-funded project, known as SMART, for "Search engine for Multimedia Environment generated content", aims to develop and implement a system to allow internet users to search and analyse data from these sensors, a university release said.

By matching search queries with information from sensors and cross-referencing data from social networks such as Twitter, users will be able to receive detailed responses to questions such as "What part of the city hosts live music events which my friends have been to recently?" or "How busy is the city centre?"

Currently, standard search engines such as Google are not able to answer search queries of this type, the release added.

Dr Iadh Ounis, of the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science, said: "The SMART engine will be able to answer high-level queries by automatically identifying cameras, microphones and other sensors that can contribute to the query, then synthesising results stemming from distributed sources in an intelligent way".

SMART, he said, builds upon the existing concept of "smart cities", physical spaces which are covered in an array of intelligent sensors which communicate with each other and can be searched for information.

The search results sourced from these smart cities can be reused across multiple applications, making the system more effective.

SMART is likely to be tested in a real city by 2014. The SMART project is a joint research initiative of nine partners including Atos, Athens Information Technology, IBM's Haifa Research Lab, Imperial College London, City of Santander, PRISA Digital, Telesto and Consorzio S3 Log.