airwith

Airwith is an open-source platform and protocol for collecting, aggregating, and distributing environmental sensing data, with an emphasis on air quality information. It provides a standardized data model, cross-platform client libraries, and services designed to enable interoperability among sensors, applications, and municipal systems.

The core goals of airwith are to lower barriers to data sharing, improve data quality through normalization and provenance, and support real-time as well as historical analyses. The project defines a modular architecture that separates data collection, normalization, storage, and distribution, allowing different components to be developed and updated independently.

Architecture and data model: Airwith uses a geotagged data model that represents measurements as timestamped records with fields such as pollutant type, concentration, units, location, and sensor metadata. It supports multiple transport layers, including MQTT, WebSocket, and HTTP, and offers offline caching for intermittent connectivity. Security is addressed with end-to-end encryption, access control lists, and signed data payloads to ensure data integrity and privacy.

Features: Real-time streams, historical queries, data validation rules, sensor metadata management, provenance tagging, and role-based access control. It includes reference implementations for JavaScript, Python, and mobile platforms to ease integration with existing projects.

Use cases: Citizen science and community monitoring, municipal dashboards, research projects, and cross-organization data sharing. Adoption is strongest in regions with active air-quality initiatives and open-data policies.

Governance and licensing: Airwith is released under an open-source license (Apache 2.0) with governance by a neutral foundation and community-maintained specifications.

Reception: Proponents cite improved interoperability and privacy protections, while critics point to varying sensor quality and the complexity of coordinating multiple stakeholders. See also: Air quality monitoring, Internet of Things, Open data, MQTT, WebSocket, GeoJSON.