Ideas about presenting data coming from sensors

[Achilleas Mantzios - cloud <a.mantzios@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear PostgreSQL people

We have a project having to do with capturing sensor data and alarms 
from various machinery using various protocols/standards (e.g. NMEA , 
MODBUS). We have about 150 sites (vessels of various types) and each 
site will generate about 500 rows per minute. We have solved most of the 
design + issues regarding DB, data transfer to the central DB, etc and 
now we have started to think about presenting them.

Ideally and eventually each one of those will be connected to some 
machinery item defined in our inventory / live system, so the final goal 
is to have smth like "mimics" and interactive UI that will let the user 
have an overall view of  the fleet (all vessels), spot the red/orange 
ones, then click on a vessel, spot the red/orange areas, then keep on 
zooming in until he/she finds the exact item that is in trouble.

This is the rough idea.

But for now we are more interested in just viewing the incoming data 
that will be basically tag/value pairs.

The types of those data will be divided in normal tag with a normal 
float value, or alarm data which have about 2 discrete boolean variables 
(valid and acknowledged). So we want to cover those two cases as far as 
viewing is concerned.

The data will have minutely resolution. So if a vessel e.g. has 700 
discrete tags then the system will generate and transfer to the central 
DB 700 rows for every minute.

Any ideas? Graphs time series? We have graphs (Java) that show time 
series with daily resolution. What would you guys recommend for showing 
such data, coming from data acquisition systems ?

Thank you!