Development of reusable software components for monitoring data management, visualization and analysis

The permanent or regular monitoring of structures with sensors of any type can generate a consistent volume of data. Furthermore, it is often necessary to store additional information that is useful for the analysis of the measurements. This data should be comprehensible even after tens of years. Our experience has shown that the use of relational database structures can greatly simplify the handling of this large data-flow. With an appropriate data structure, the measurement data and other related information on the monitoring network, the structure and its environment can be organized in a single file that will follow the structure's life in the years. The standardization of a database structure for storing monitoring data also allows the development of re-usable components for data acquisition, data analysis and representation. The use of relational database structures greatly simplifies the quality management and can help in the certification of monitoring systems. This contribution presents a new open and free standard for database structures aiming to the archival of long-term monitoring data (SDB standard). The implementation of this standard in data acquisition, analysis and representation software modules will also be described.