Thinking about how to deal with new Public Lab tools that involve environmental sensors of various types, I serendipitously met Luis Bermudez from the Open Geospatial Consortium. He related the OGC's work on standards for sharing sensor data on the web.

• Here's an overview of what they have developed: http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/markets-technologies/swe

• This Google Code site is the code repository for applications that make it easier to get sensor data to align with standards: https://code.google.com/p/oostethys/

• Here is a nice link on the process the Open Geospatial Consortium follows to collaboratively "define, document, and implement open standards that solve geospatial interoperability problems": http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/process

• Here is the link to their working group on the sensor web enablement standards: http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/sensorwebdwg

• Here is link to a white paper on "SWE" (PDF download available): http://opengeo.org/publications/opengeo-swe/