Patent ID: 7930143

Claim:
A sensing device comprising: two or more sensors of different types; a processor; a local data store within the sensing device, wherein a distributed database comprises the local data store of the sensing device and a composite data store on a server computer, the distributed database being managed by a relational database management system and wherein the local data store comprises a set of lightweight database components local to the sensing device; and instructions executable by the processor to: acquire data with each of the two or more sensors; filter the acquired data according to the type of sensor that acquired the acquired data to eliminate one or more portions of the acquired data before storing the filtered data in the local data store, wherein filtering the acquired data according to the type of sensor that acquired the data is further based on one or more filtering rules of the lightweight database components local to the sensing device and wherein the one or more filtering rules of the lightweight database components are based on data received from the composite data store; store at least a portion of the filtered data in the local data store, as a data set, wherein the filtered data set comprises a subset of the acquired data and storing at least a portion of the filtered data comprises storing less than all of the acquired data; process the stored data before synchronization; and synchronize at least a portion of the data set stored in the local data store with the composite data store on the server computer.