Sascha Schlobinski

Vision and Requirements of Scenario-Driven Environmental Decision Support Systems Supporting Automation for End Users

This paper discusses the vision and requirements of a highly interactive workbench which supports decision makers using distributed resources including models as automated components of an integrated environmental decision support system. The concepts discussed are results of the SUDPLAN project, an EU FP7 project which aims at developing advanced tools for climate change adaptation for city planners and city managers. To this end, SUDPLAN incorporates access to climate change models and model results as an important common service. This paper provides an overview of SUDPLAN, with special emphasis on the highly interactive Scenario Management System. It also includes an overview of the user requirements derived through a user-centred design process engaging highly diverse user representatives of four pilot application cities.

A Decision Support System for Urban Climate Change Adaptation

This paper gives an overview of a decision support system for scientists and city planners which shall be suitable to assess climate change effects on urban environments, and which shall enable city planners to investigate different measures to cope with potential effects of climate change. The system named SUDPLAN (Sustainable Urban Development Planner) is currently under development and the first version of the SUDPLAN software will be available when the HICSS conference is held. SUDPLAN is a project funded under the European Framework Program FP7.

Integrating Climate Change in the Urban Planning Process – A Case Study

The ongoing European collaborative project SUDPLAN is targeted on the development of a software framework that allows the integration of climate change aspects in urban planning processes. Besides the implementation of the generic modules SUDPLAN comprises the implementation of four tangible pilot applications of the framework, one of them in the German City of Wuppertal. This “Wuppertal pilot” deals with urban storm water management and the prevention of infrastructure damages under present and future climate conditions. It can be considered as a case study for the integration of climate change in an actual, long-term urban planning process. This article describes the basic conditions of the case study and the building blocks of the intended decision support environment for urban planners, including the local models used for the simulation of storm water runoff, both in the sewers and on the surface.

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.

An Information System Supporting WFD Reporting

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) defines the quality goals for European water bodies until 2027. Water bodies are managed on very different governmental levels in the member states. Due to the federal system, Germany has a complex structure of responsibilities regarding the management and maintenance of water bodies in Europe.

How to Build Integrated Climate Change Enabled EDSS

Results from global and regional climate scenario modelling predict significant changes in temperature and precipitation during the rest of the century. Episodes with extremely high temperatures and more intense rainfall will occur more often. Climate change will affect the urban environment and should be taken into account in long term and sustainable urban planning for adaptation to the new climate conditions. To consider the effects of climate change in today’s planning, tools are needed to support the development of climate change enabled applications. These tools have to support several aspects of application development in the context of EDSS: a) How can the results from climate change models be integrated in today’s applications? b) How to access climate change information? c) How to compare local effects of climate change scenarios? d) How to gain access to downscaling functionality required for local problems? e) How to feed local models with climate scenario data. Or in other words: How to build climate change enabled applications.

An Environmental Decision Support System for Water Issues in the Oil Industry

Many decision makers are hindered in their daily work by “un-integrated” systems which can force them to move data around between tools which are only more or less compatible. Because environmental models play an important role in environmental decision support systems, the integration of models into user-friendly integrated decision support systems is essential to the support of such users. This paper presents a decision support system supporting users involved in the protection of the Coatzacoalcos River in Mexico near the largest agglomeration of petrochemical installations in Mexico, which are operated by the Mexican oil company Petroleos Mexicanos. At the same time, the area is densely populated and important for agriculture.

A Service Access Control Framework for a Sensor Service Architecture

Sensor and earth observation data are becoming more and more available through service networks. In order to provide operational services, reliable and easy to use mechanisms for security, authentication and distributed access control are vital for service providers when offering their services. This paper describes a Service Access Control (SAC) framework which was developed as part of the SANY project, a project of the 6th European Framework Program (FP6) which has developed a reference model and service architecture for sensor service networks. The result of this work is the CHARON Service Access Control Framework, which aims at overcoming the major problems identified in the analysis. This paper describes the overall functionality of the SANY SAC framework, its implementation CHARON and its key components.

An Information Model for a Water Information Platform

Sharing of open government data is amongst other reasons hindered by incompatibility of data models in different data collections. Only a few areas in the environmental domain have progressed towards commonly used data models. The purpose of this paper is to share with the community a data model which is used in a spatial information platform being built for the purpose of sharing open government data in the domain of water sciences. The objective when building the information model was not to be restricted to one and only one (meta)data standard. The information model therefore uses several standards and extension mechanisms: the ISO19000 series, the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), dynamic tag extension and dynamic content extension. The CKAN domain model can also be mapped to semantic-web-compatible standards like Dublin Core and the Data Catalogue Vocabulary of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Decision Making and Strategic Planning for Disaster Preparedness with a Multi-Criteria-Analysis Decision Support System

In the context of the CRISMA FP7 project we have developed a seamless decision support concept to connect simulated crisis scenarios and aggregated performance indicators of impact scenarios with state of the art Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods. To prove the practicality of the approach we have developed a decision support tool realising the important aspects of the method. The tool is a highly interactive and user-friendly decision support system (DSS) that effectively helps the decision maker and strategic planner to perform multi-criteria ranking of scenarios. The tool is based on state-of-the-art web technologies.