A new project to develop a search engine which will draw its results from sensors is being undertaken by computer scientists at the University of Glasgow.
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 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 is likely to be tested in a real city by 2014.
