Many sensor networks have been deployed to monitor Earth's environment, and moreare planned for the future. Environmental sensors have continuously improved by becoming smaller, cheaper,more intelligent, and more reliable. But due to the large number of sensor manufacturers and accompanyingprotocols, integrating diverse sensors into observing systems is not straightforward, requiring development ofdriver software and manual tedious configuration. Use of standard protocols and formats can improve andautomate the process of sensor installation, operation, and data processing. The Open GeospatialConsortium's Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative defines standards which make sensors available overthe Web through standardized formats and Web Service interfaces by hiding the heterogeneity of sensorprotocols from the application layer. Current SWE standards do not deal with actual sensor protocols, and theconnection between sensors and SWE services is usually established by manually adapting the internals ofthe SWE service implementation to the specific sensor interface. Such sensor "drivers" have to be built foreach kind of sensor interface, which leads to extensive efforts in developing large-scale systems.To tackle this issue we have developed a model for Sensor Interface Descriptors (SID) which enables thedeclarative description of sensor interfaces, including the definition of the communication protocol, sensorcommands, processing steps and metadata association. The model is designed as a profile and extension ofOGC SWE's Sensor Model Language standard. In this model, a SID is defined in XML for each kind of sensorprotocol. SID instances for particular sensor types can be reused in different scenarios and can be sharedamong user communities. A SID interpreter can be built which translates between various sensor protocolsand SWE protocols, hence closing the described interoperability gap. The SID interpreter is independent ofany particular sensor technology, and can communicate with any sensor whose protocol can be described bya SID. The SID interpreter transfers retrieved sensor data to a Sensor Observation Service, and transformstasks submitted to a Sensor Planning Service to actual sensor commands.The proposed SWE PUCK protocol complements SID by providing a standard way to associate a sensor witha SID, thereby completely automating the sensor integration process. PUCK protocol is implemented insensor firmware, and provides a means to retrieve a universally unique identifer, metadata and otherinformation from the device itself through its communication interface. Thus the SID interpreter can retrieve aSID directly from the sensor through PUCK protocol. Alternatively the interpreter can retrieve the sensor’s SIDfrom an external source, based on the unique sensor ID provided by PUCK protocol.In this presentation, we describe the end-to-end integration of several commercial oceanographic instrumentsinto a sensor network using PUCK, SID and SWE services. We also present a user-friendly, graphical tool togenerate SIDs and tools to visualize sensor data