Case Study: University of Muenster achieves a scalable, faster openSenseMap to engage citizens and students with Amazon Web Services

University of Muenster Creates openSenseMap to Engage with Citizens and Students

The University of Muenster created openSenseMap and the senseBox program to engage citizens and students in hands-on environmental and programming education by collecting open geographic and sensor data (temperature, humidity, pressure, illuminance) from DIY sensor stations. The project struggled with performance and scalability on university local servers as it sought to grow participation and better support classrooms and citizen-science projects.

To solve this, the team migrated openSenseMap to the AWS Cloud, gaining improved speed, stability, security, and scalability. Since the move they tripled active sensors from about 60 to 250, supported award-winning outreach (CodeWeek) and a youth hackathon, and enabled students and citizens to build apps and voice interfaces (Alexa), store data on S3, and freely access open data for research and education.

University of Muenster

Thomas Bartoschek

Research Associate at the Institute for Geoinformatics