COMMUNICATION EFFICIENT SPATIAL SEARCH IN A SENSOR DATA WEB PORTAL

Techniques for collecting and displaying sensor data captured by a spatially representative sample of sensors requested in a search query are described. The sensors are represented in an index structure (e.g., a data tree). In response to a query, the index structure is leveraged to identify a subset of sensors that exhibits a similar spatial distribution to the original full set of sensors. Sensor data is then collected from the subset of sensors by probing the sensors or retrieving recently cached data located by the index and returned to satisfy the query. In this manner, the number of sensors to be probed is reduced, thereby reducing latency involved with polling a large number of sensors and making the search process more efficient.