MAPISA, a web based framework for structural health monitoring

The paper describes a Multi Plug-In Software Architecture, MAPISA, designed mainly to enable users and researchers involved with sensor network data to manage relevant information, thereby improving process interoperability, composition and heterogeneity. MAPISA can easily be extended to support new types of sensor data sources in such a way that is completely transparent for end users. MAPISA functional characteristics enable professional users to perform various specific tasks on a given sensor dataset, such as mathematical model uploading to perform simulations on different, dynamically selected datasets and data visualization. Even non-expert users can utilize applications based on MAPISA, since it stores all significant data collected from monitored sites which can easily be read and visualized in summarizing reports. The entire framework has been designed by applying the fundamental principles of software engineering; in particular, modularity and interoperability concepts have been given a fundamental role in order to facilitate the implementation of new features into the platform. In particular, MAPISA is ideal as a base framework for web 2.0 applications. Therefore MAPISA functions as a middleware that enables stored data to be exchanged between potential users and fully-deployed sensor networks so that relevant information can easily be accessed. In order to demonstrate the advantages of this framework, this study presents the development of a web application together with a plug-in and also the integration of a mathematical model. The latter application will also show the output graphs resulting from the running of the mathematical model.