Verena Klinger

A Water-Related Web-Based Information System for the Sustainable Development of the Mekong Delta

One goal of the WISDOM (Water-related Information System for the Sustainable development of the Mekong Delta) project lies in the development and implementation of an innovative water information system containing all the outcomes and results of the different research disciplines involved in the bi-lateral German-Vietnamese project. The topics stem from natural and social sciences and cover all major issues that come into play in an Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) system. In line with the IWRM principles, the envisaged information system communicates all research results to local stakeholders and decision makers. It is a web-based geo information system, additionally incorporating non-geographic data such as statistics, literature and reports, legal documents, institutional mappings and others. One major challenge, therefore, lies in the management of heterogeneous data for easy access, so that non-GIS expert users can easily find information to support them in their decision-making. This chapter gives an overview of the main requirements that constitute the system’s architecture and describes the layered architecture with its data management tier, logic tier and presentation tier. A short discussion on the sustainable operation, after the project ends, is also given in the outlook section.

Data standardization and modeling in a web based information system

This paper describes data handling within a web-based information system in terms of data standardization, data modeling and data ingestion. The information system developed under the premise to make all datasets generated within the WISDOM project available for regional decision makers is based on a PostgreSQL object-relational database. Data standardization in this context is implemented by project specific guidelines that follow international standards like IS019115/19139 or OGC compliant Styled Layer Descriptors (SLD). Data modeling on the other hand improves data retrieval and accessibility by adding contextual information to all datasets through the registration to spatial, thematic and temporal reference objects. Ingesting new datasets into the information system is done in an automatic way for spatial datasets using a Java application, while non-spatial datasets have to be ingested by SQL commands. Implementing web-based interfaces to enable registered users to upload new datasets is a future task.