A surveillance architecture having applications in a wide variety of surveillance-related applications is disclosed. This architecture can be used in various surveillance scenarios, including, but not limited to, chemical, biological, radiological surveillance and physical security, is highly scalable and allows for rapid, plug-and-play field data / sample acquisition and local and remote sharing of system resources. By design, the architecture also fosters fault tolerance and allows users to quickly deploy and establish ad hoc, semi-permanent, and permanent surveillance systems. Furthermore, the architecture's service-oriented approach allows for rapid, on-the-fly, plug-and-play integration and dynamic harvesting of heterogeneous surveillance technologies (e.g., sensors, handheld data acquisition devices, analytical instrumentation, and so forth).