Sites

A site refers to a single location where data events are recorded. This could be a collection of sensors grouped together like a weather station measuring temperature, wind speed, and atmospheric pressure. Or, it could simply be a lab worker going out to the same place in a river and measuring the water level.

It encompasses both the physical location and the metadata describing the site such as site name, code, any photos of this location, and a key:value tagging system to help you describe that location beyond what's available in the fields provided by the API.

A site is not the physical sensors that are deployed at the site's location. That metadata lives in the Sensor table of HydroServer's database.

A side note on Thing vs. Site

SensorThings uses the term Thing in order to stay as general as possible. In the field of water data management, users are more more often familiar with the term Site as in a monitoring site. Therefore, we've opted to refer to a Thing as Site in all of our user facing applications. But, to strictly follow the SensorThings specification, we've kept SensorThing's original Thing naming in our APIs.

key:value tagging system

Most of the metadata you’ll need is already supported by HydroServer’s API. However, for organization-specific or custom information, tags offer a flexible way to store additional metadata that doesn’t fit into the standard fields. Tags are extra, customizable, key:value pairs that provide more context or categorization to the data. For example, you might use tags to link to your sites to 3rd party websites: website:https://my-website.com.