Clemens Düpmeier

Theme Park Environment as an example of environmental information systems for the public

Abstract Presenting environmental information to the public with the intention of enhancing the understanding of the environment and promoting environmental awareness requires the creation of dedicated types of environmental information systems (EIS). This paper presents concepts for the structure, contents, and implementation of such EIS for the public, with the “Theme Park Environment” ( http://themenpark-umwelt.baden-wuerttemberg.de/ ) serving as an example. The Theme Park Environment has been developed by Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe and the State Institute for Environmental Protection for the Ministry of the Environment of Baden-Wurttemberg. It contains information about soil, geology, and nature and interlinks this environmental information with other topics, such as local food production, historic site information, and environmental policy to increase the interest of the users. The system uses concepts of content management and multimedia systems with map server technology and database-driven structured information access for combining structured environmental information, location-based information, and text and multimedia contents in integrated Web pages. By means of an embedded ontology-based system, authors can relate different parts of content objects with each other and with multimedia contents, maps, fact information in databases, and other description parts. In this way, information within the Theme Park Environment can be reorganised dynamically and contents can be reused and shared easily.

Generic Web Framework for Environmental Data Visualization

The Web and the growing popularity of Internet of Things show a large need for data visualization. This paper presents both a concept and an implemented prototype for a framework that supports a user in creating data visualizations on the Web. The concept is based on a microservice architecture using lightweight REST based service interfaces for communication. The prototype is evaluated using environmental data gathered by the State Office for the Environment, Measurements and Nature Conservation of the Federal State of Baden-Wurttemberg (LUBW). The main advantages of the framework are high customizability and no requirements for programming skills for using a large part of the framework.

A Concept for the Control, Monitoring and Visualization Center in Energy Lab 2.0

Energy Lab 2.0 is designed as a large experimental test and simulation field for multi-scale and multi-mode energy system facilities at KIT. A Smart Energy System Simulation and Control Center SEnSSiCC is the core component in terms of information and communication technology. The present article introduces basic concepts for the Control, Monitoring and Visualization Center CMVC of SEnSSiCC. The CMVC bundles all communication channels and real facilities, simulation environments, and data repositories into an integrated research environment for planning, control, monitoring, analyzing and visualization of smart grids and their components, and furthermore for evaluating future concepts for smart grid utility operation. Special emphasis is placed on the distributed computing operating system environment setup for the CMVC, the intended use of Big Data technologies, the polyglot approach for data management and analysis, and first concepts for implementing a hybrid agent based simulation environment. Also, the usage of web technologies and microservices are considered as key aspects of the overall architecture.

“My Environment” – A Dashboard for Environmental Information on Mobile Devices

This paper describes a universal approach to the development of a cross-platform and multi-functional environmental mobile application. According to the Pareto principle [1] only common use cases are implemented and can be described in a lightweight description format instead of being explicitly programmed. These use cases include information about the environment (“my environment”), reporting of environmental data (“crowd sourcing”), and environmental experience (“electronic nature guide”).

A Generic Microservice Architecture for Environmental Data Management

The growing popularity of Web applications and the Internet of Things cause an urgent need for modern scalable data management to cope with large amounts of data. In the environmental domain these problems also need a solution because of big data coming from a large amount of sensors or users (e.g. crowdsourcing applications). This paper presents an architecture that uses a microservice approach to create a data management backend for the mentioned applications. The main concept shows that microservices can be used to define separate services for different data types and management tasks. This separation leads to many advantages such as better scalability and low coupling between different features. Two prototypes, which are already implemented, are evaluated in this paper.

A Generic Web Cache Infrastructure for the Provision of Multifarious Environmental Data

As a basis for the efficient data supply for web portals, web-based and mobile applications of several German environmental authorities, a microservice-based infrastructure is being used. It consists of a generic data model and a series of corresponding generic services, e.g. for the provision of master data, metrics, spatial data, digital assets, metadata, and links between them. The main objectives are the efficient provision of data as well as the use of the same data by a wide range of applications. In addition, the used technologies and services should enable data supplyasopen (government) data or as linked data in the sense of the Semantic Web. In a first version, these services are used exclusively for read access to the data. For this purpose, the data are usually extracted from their original systems, possibly processed and then stored redundantly in powerful backend systems (“Web Cache”). Generic microservices provide uniform REST interfaces to access the data. Each service can use different backend systems connected via adapters. In this way, consuming components such as frontend modules in a Web portal can transparently access various backend systems via stable interfaces, which can therefore be selected optimally for each application. A number of tools and workflows ensure the updating and consistency of the data in the Web Cache. Microservices and backend systems are operated on the basis of container virtualization using flexible cloud infrastructures.

Towards a Search Driven System Architecture for Environmental Information Portals

In order to merge data from different information systems in web portals, querying of this data has to be simple and with good performance. If no direct, high-performance query services are available, data access can be provided (and often accelerated) using external search indexes, which is well-proven for unstructured data by means of classical full text search engines. This article describes how structured data can be provided through search engines, too, and how this data then can be re-used by other applications, e.g., mobile apps or business applications, incidentally reducing their complexity and the number of required interfaces. Users of environmental portals and applications can benefit from an integrated view on unstructured as well as on structured data.

Concept and benchmark results for Big Data energy forecasting based on Apache Spark

The present article describes a concept for the creation and application of energy forecasting models in a distributed environment. Additionally, a benchmark comparing the time required for the training and application of data-driven forecasting models on a single computer and a computing cluster is presented. This comparison is based on a simulated dataset and both R and Apache Spark are used. Furthermore, the obtained results show certain points in which the utilization of distributed computing based on Spark may be advantageous.

From Sensors to Users—Using Microservices for the Handling of Measurement Data

This article presents a microservice-oriented concept for the handling of measurement data. It consists of five phases providing collection, processing, persisting, dissemination and presentation of measurement data. The concept has been implemented and evaluated for one use case dealing with air pollutants and air quality time series. It includes tools for data ingestion as well as a set of generic microservices for the provision of different data types.

A Lightweight Web Components Framework for Accessing Generic Data Services in Environmental Information Systems

This article presents a lightweight framework that allows web components to access data services via standard interfaces. The framework is used in combination with the Generic Microservice Backend (GMB) project which provides a wide range of different services for data management, analysis and visualization e.g. for the implementation of web based environmental information systems. The framework allows an easy implementation of web components by using a centralized communication and controller module that can handle interactive events in the frontend of a web application and data requests towards the backend. The framework can be used to create complex dashboard and portal server pages with a responsive design without much programming.