Standard interfaces for data and information access facilitate data management and usability by minimizing the effort required to acquire, catalog and integrate data from a variety of sources. The authors have prototyped several data management and analysis applications using Sensor Web Enablement Services, a suite of service protocols being developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium specifically for handling sensor data in near real time. This paper provides a brief overview of some of the service protocols and describes how they are used in three different sensor web projects involving near real time management of sensor data.