Thorsten Schlachter

“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.

Leveraging Ontologies for Environmental Information Systems

The provision of accurate, comprehensive and condensed information contained in distributed environmental information systems via public search interfaces raises several technological challenges. Our approach to tackle these challenges is based on a consequent use of ontologies. Starting with an analysis of requirements resulting from semantic search scenarios, we explain the advantages of using ontologies based on standards and aim to reuse and transform terminological systems available in the environmental domain into ontologies. We develop an architecture guided by the premise of exerting a minimum of influence on existing search infrastructures. As a consequence of using a (possibly large) number of ontologies, tools for ontology management are needed. A key argument for using ontologies is that nowadays – as an outcome of the Semantic Web initiative - very powerful processing tools are available. We elaborate ontology mapping as an example and outline how a comprehensive ontology management can be achieved.

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.

Towards a Universal Search in Environmental Information Systems

Full-text search functions in environmental portals make a large amount of environmental data accessible. Many data sources, however, are not suited for indexing by search machines or the data themselves are not suited for access by full-text search. A possibility to make such data of the “dark web” accessible consists in addressing the data sources in the environmental portal directly. The procedure presented here starts with a formal description of data sources (e.g. from the point of view of the portal, these are the target systems). Based on this description, a special component of full-text search, the so-called search broker, can extend and detail a search query, such that all necessary parameters (if possible) are compiled to address these systems and to guide the user directly to the data desired. The presentation component of the environmental portal is responsible for the adequate compilation and display of these data, the so-called result mash-up.