Jiří Hřebíček

eEnvironment: Reality and Challenges for eEnvironment Implementation in Europe

The White Paper on eEnvironment introduced the content of eEnvironment at the Ad hoc Committee on eDemocracy of the Council of Europe in 2007. The Recommendation CM/Rec(2009)1 of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to member states on electronic democracy (e-Democracy) specified eEnvironment in more detail. The objective is that any citizen can be informed about environmental matters and can use this information for active participation in decision making and environmental protection.

National Environmental Data Facilities and Services of the Czech Republic and Their Use in Environmental Economics

National environmental data facilities and services are part of the environmental information systems of the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic that have been under development since 1990. In 2010 the development of the National Information System for Collecting and Evaluating Information on Environmental Pollution project started, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. This project consists of an integrated system of reporting (ISPOP), an environmental help desk (EnviHELP), and the national INSPIRE geoportal, which were developed between 2010 and 2013 and were discussed at ISESS 2013. This paper introduces the current development of several national environmental and financial data facilities and services based on eGovernment implementation in the Czech Republic and the open environmental and financial data approach of the Czech Ministry of the Environment and the Czech Ministry of Finance. It also introduces the web information system that enabled us to find the relationship between environmental economics and municipal waste management in the Czech Republic.

Decision Support of Waste Management Expenditures Efficiency Assessment

This paper is devoted to the development of methodology and information and communication technology tools for decision support in the public sector. It analyses appropriate metrics for a municipal solid waste management expenditure (MSWE) efficiency assessment using cost-effectiveness Analysis (CEA). In addition to many other methodological issues, finding a proper output (performance, outcome) measurement is important. From the point of view of municipalities, such a measurement ought to be as clear and simple to use as possible. We analyse three possible criteria – total generated municipal solid waste, population, and municipality area – for evaluating MSWE efficiency in order to examine their appropriateness for municipal administration. The analysis covers three years, from 2009 to 2011, and municipalities from the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. We focus on a sample of 21 municipalities with specific administrative status. Expenditures were estimated using open public data from the Czech Ministry of Finance municipal accounts database. Correlation analysis showed a very strong relationship between the three chosen criteria. Public administration can certainly use all of the criteria for an efficiency assessment of MSWE to aid in decision making. However, the most suitable criterion to be population, since efficiency analysis results showed a strong correlation between population and both CEA for waste amount and CEA for municipality area. Moreover, population has a stronger relationship with MSWE than either of the other two criteria.

An Architecture for the Semantic Enhancement of Environmental Resources

The vision of a Single Information Space in Europe for the Environment (SISE) requires seamless access to environmental resources, including data, models and services. Standardization organizations like OGC and OASIS have laid the foundations for interoperability on a syntactic level for many aspects of distributed environmental information systems (e.g. OGC SWE for sensor information). At the same time, the EC has undertaken a considerable effort to commit European stakeholders to offering their environmental information in such a way that it is accessible by interested parties, both on the scientific level by supporting research projects, like ORCHESTRA and SANY, and on the legal level by introducing directives (such as the INSPIRE directive). This development, amongst others, has led to the present situation in which a large number of environmental information sources are available. However, to implement the vision of the SISE it is not enough to publish resources. Environmental information must be discoverable, and it must be ‘understandable’ in different contexts in order to be used effectively by parties of various thematic domains. Therefore, in order to foster the implementation of SISE, semantic interoperability is a necessary element. Key to semantic interoperability is the presence of meta-information which describes the concepts of the environmental resources. Producing this meta-information puts a heavy technological burden on the individual resource providers such that it seems unlikely that enough semantic meta-information will ever be made available to reach semantic interoperability and thus accomplish the vision of SISE unless other ways to provide this essential meta-information are found. In this paper we introduce an architecture, developed in the FP7 project TaToo (247893), which tries to overcome the aforementioned obstacles by providing the possibility to easily annotate and rate environmental information resources, even by parties which do not own the resource, and transparently equipping this information with domain knowledge and thus enhancing discoverability and usability of resources with semantic technologies. The objective of the architecture is to seamlessly blend in with existing infrastructures by making use of de facto standards while offering support for discovery, annotation and validation of environmental resources through open interfaces.

Modelling with Maple and MapleSim

The paper deals with the system Maple in mathematical modelling and computer simulation of technical or financial problems. Avaiable toolboxes are mentioned and toolbox for financial modelling is described in more detail. There are presented some solved problems using Maple and introduced shortly developed modelling and simulation tool - MapleSim.

Population age structure and the cost of municipal waste collection. A case study from the Czech Republic

Waste management is a common public service whose provision is the responsibility of local governments. As is usual with public services, the question of its efficiency naturally arises. The majority of studies focus on such efficiency from the perspective of the provider. This is based on the assumption that waste collection expenditure is a function of available equipment and municipal characteristics. In our opinion this approach has its limitations, and therefore we have used a novel approach based on the demand from municipal citizens for waste collection services. We build on previous results obtained from data concerning social and demographic characteristics, and focus on the relationship between age and expenditure on municipal solid waste, concentrating specifically on the ageing of the population. The ageing of societies in general is a very topical issue, but there is rather little focus in research on the effects of ageing on the demand for various public services. The research that does exist in the area of waste management that takes the age factor into account typically only makes a very rough division of the population into age categories such as children, people of working age and elderly people. Such wide groups naturally contain people with a large variety of needs, and therefore often lead to ambiguous results. The goal of our paper is to examine this topic in more detail, and to estimate the effects of various age categories of municipal citizens on municipal waste expenditure. We use models with age categories differentiated by decades, an approach which provides significantly more detailed information than the age variables used in other studies in this area. We use population age and waste management expenditure data collected from more than 6100 municipalities in the Czech Republic in 2011 and 2014. The results of our investigation have shown that senior citizens of a certain age (approximately at the onset of retirement) have a surprisingly strong influence on waste management expenditure.

Environmental Software Systems. Infrastructures, Services and Applications

The history of a piece of information is known as “provenance”. From extensive interactions with hydro-and geo-scientists in Australian science agencies we found both widespread demand for provenance and widespread confusion about how to manage it and how to develop requirements for managing it. We take inspiration from the well-known software development Capability Maturity Model to design a Maturity Model for provenance management that we call the PMM. The PMM can be used to assess the state of existing practices within an organisation or project, to benchmark practices and existing tools, to develop requirements for new provenance projects, and to track improvements in provenance management across an organisational unit. We present the PMM and evaluate it through application in a workshop of scientists across three data-intensive science projects. We find that scientists recognise the value of a structured approach to requirements elicitation that ensures that aspects are not overlooked.

GENASIS Information System: A Global Environmental Assessment of Persistent Organic Pollutants

Global ENvironmental ASsessment and Information System (GENASIS) is a tool developed by expert teams of the Research Centre for Toxic Compounds in the Environment (RECETOX) and the Institute for Biostatistics and Analyses (IBA) of the Masaryk University in Brno. The aim of GENASIS is to compile validated data on persistent organic pollutants, including their properties, sources, long-term levels, life times, transport mechanisms, effects and risks, scattered throughout various institutions and ministries, and to provide tools for their visualization, analyses, interpretation, assessment of environmental and human risks or modelling of fate. Such a tool should significantly enhance comprehensive understanding of the fate of POPs in the environment, their impacts on ecosystem and the human population.

National INSPIRE Geoportal of the Czech Republic

Environmental information systems of the Czech Republic´s Ministry of Environment have been developed since 1990. Creation of the National Information System to Collect and Evaluate Information on Environmental Pollution began in 2010. This project has been co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. The project is split into three parts: (a) Integrated Reporting System (ISPOP); (b) Environmental helpdesk (EnviHELP) and (c) National INSPIRE Geoportal (Geoportal), which were developed in 2010-2013. In this article, Geoportal as national implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in the Czech Republic is presented in more detail including several usage examples.

Conceptual Model Enhancing Accessibility of Data from Cancer–Related Environmental Risk Assessment Studies

This paper proposes conceptual model which can be used to facilitate the discovery, integration and analysis of environmental data in cancer-related risk studies. Persistent organic pollutants were chosen as a model because of their persistence, bioaccumulation potential and genotoxicity. Part dealing with cancer risk is primarily focused on population-based observations encompassing a wide range of epidemiologic studies, from local investigations to national cancer registries. The proposed model adopted multilayer hierarchy working with characteristics of given entities (POPs, cancer diseases as nomenclature classes) and couples “observation – measurement” as content defining classes. The proposal extends formally used taxonomy applying multidimensional set of descriptors including scores of measurement validity and precision. This solution has the potential to aid multidisciplinary data discovery and knowledge mining. The same structure of descriptors used for environmental and cancer part enables the users to integrate different data sources recognizing their methodical origin, time & space coordinates and validity.