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https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-679/editorial.pdf
Editorial to the Proceedings of the Workshop
Environmental Information Systems and Services –
Infrastructures and Platforms
(ENVIP’2010)
Arne J. Berre1, Dumitru Roman1, and Patrick Maué2
1
SINTEF, Oslo, Norway
2
University of Muenster, Germany
Abstract. This paper describes the scope, structure and contents, and outcomes
of the Environmental Information Systems and Services – Infrastructures and
Platforms (ENVIP’2010) workshop, which was held during October 7-8, 2010,
in conjunction with the ENVIROINFO 2010 conference in Bonn, Germany.
Keywords: Environmental infrastructures and platforms, environmental
monitoring
1 Introduction
The Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS)1 is one of three major
initiatives along with the INSPIRE Directive2 and the Global Monitoring for
Environment and Security (GMES)3 undertaken by Europe to collect and share
environmental information for the benefit of the global society. Different efforts are
now emerging towards the creation of infrastructures and platforms for
Environmental Information Systems and Services – including Infrastructures for
flexible discovery and chaining of distributed environmental services.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have an essential role to play
in the context of Environmental systems as they provide the necessary support in
terms of tools, systems and protocols to establish a dynamic environmental space of
collaboration in a more and more sophisticated digital world. Core challenges are not
only related to providing seamless environmental data access to public authorities,
businesses and the public at large, but also to allowing for interoperable
environmental services based on Web technologies, and stimulating new market
opportunities. ICT for environmental collaboration is widely recognised as a major
step for addressing complex management issues including adaptation to climate
change and sustainable management of urban environment. The European
Commission recently funded several projects4 in the area of ICT for Sustainable
1 http://ec.europa.eu/environment/seis/
2 http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
3 http://www.gmes.info/
4 http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/sustainable-growth/environment_en.html
Growth, with a core focus on ICT for Environmental Services and Climate Change
aiming at providing the foundations for an infrastructure for monitoring, predicting
and managing the environment and its natural resources.
2 The ENVIP Workshop
The ENVIP workshop aimed to tackle the research problems as well as practical
experiences around frameworks, methods, concepts, models, languages and
technologies that enable enhanced environmental service infrastructures and
platforms. Environmental Information Systems are migrating towards being provided
as Software as a Service (SaaS) and will benefit from the utilisation and specialisation
of emerging Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) and Platforms as a Service (PaaS) as
this is emerging under the umbrellas of Cloud and Grid computing as well as the
evolution of the Future Internet. Of particular interest were the architectural,
technical, and developmental foundations of infrastructures supporting flexible
discovery and chaining of distributed environmental services, and showing how they
combine synergistically to enable better collaborations on the scale required by Future
Internet connected environments.
The ENVIP 2010 workshop was held on October 7-8, 2010, in conjunction with
the ENVIROINFO 2010 conference in Bonn, Germany. The Workshop was
successful in identifying commonalities in requirements and advancements in
solutions for environmental information system infrastructures and platforms. A
Program Committee was assembled to help with the review process, which included
experts in the topics of the workshop: Ioannis N. Athanasiadis, Nils Rune Bodsberg,
Dan Cornford, Ali Dada, Lars Gidhagen, Miha Grcar, Jorge Marx Gomez, Klaus
Greve, Avellino Giuseppe, Torill Hamre, Denis Havlik, Werner Kuhn, Joel Langlois,
Paolo Mazzetti, Olaf Østensen, Edzer Pebesma, Zoheir Sabeur, Sven Schade, Bernard
Stevenot, Gerald Schimak, Ioan Toma, Aphrodite Tsalgatidou, Leo Wanner, Kym
Watson.
Papers were formally peer-reviewed by three referees, and 13 papers were finally
accepted for presentation at the workshop and publication at the Proceedings.
The workshop was organized in five sessions and included discussions on topics
such as Infrastructures with Semantic Annotation and Uncertainty, Infrastructures
with Decision Support and Augmented Reality, Infrastructures with Ontologies and
Environmental Indicators, Infrastructures with Discovery and Service Chaining.
More details on the workshop program are available at
http://purl.org/ifgi/ENVIP10.
3 Workshop papers
The following 13 papers were presented in the workshop:
1. Closing the discovery gap in environmental information resources using
semantic annotations: the TaToo Approach by Tomas Pariente Lobo, Mauricio
Ciprian, Gerald Schimak, Giuseppe Avellino, and Sascha Schlobinski
2. Validation Scenario for Anthropogenic Impact and Global Climate Change for
Tatoo by Jiri Hrebicek, Ladislav Dusek, Miroslav Kubasek, Jiri Jarkovsky, Karel
Brabec, Ivan Holoubek, Lukas Kohut, and Jaroslav Urbanek
3. Service-Based Infrastructure for User-Oriented Environmental Information
Delivery by Leo Wanner, Harald Bosch, Nadjet Bouayad-Agha, Ulrich Bügel,
Gerard Casamayor, Thomas Ertl, Ari Karppinen, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, Tarja
Koskentalo, Simon Mille, Jürgen Moßgraber, Anastasia Moumtzidou, Maria
Myllynen, Emanuele Pianta, Marco Rospocher, Horacio Saggion, Luciano
Serafini, Virpi Tarvainen, Sara Tonelli, Thomas Usländer, and Stefanos
Vrochidis
4. The uncertainty enabled model web (UncertWeb) by Edzer Pebesma, Dan
Cornford, Stefano Nativi, and Christoph Stasch
5. Sustainable Urban Development Planner for Climate Change Adaptation
(SUDPLAN) by Lars Gidhagen, Ralf Denzer, Sascha Schlobinski, Frank Michel,
Peter Kutschera, and Denis Havlik
6. On-Site Monitoring of Environmental Processes using Mobile Augmented Reality
(HYDROSYS) by Ernst Kruijff, Erick Mendez, Eduardo Veas, and Thomas
Gruenewald
7. Ontologies and Ontology Extension for Marine Environmental Information
Systems by Adam Leadbetter, Torill Hamre, Roy Lowry, Yassine Lassoued, and
Declan Dunne
8. Bringing sustainability to the daily business: The OEPI Project by Daniel
Meyerholt, Jorge Marx Gomez, Ali Dada, Joerg Bremer, and Barbara Rapp
9. GENESI-DEC: a federative e-infrastructure for Earth Science data discovery,
access, and on-demand processing by Roberto Cossu, Fabrizio Pacini, Fabrice
Brito,Luigi Fusco, Eliana Li Santi, and Andrea Parrini
10. Supporting Environmental Information Systems and Services Realization with the
Geo-Spatial and Streaming Dimensions of the Semantic Web by Emanuele Della
Valle and Alessio Carenini
11. Adaptable Environmental Service Chains: The Challenges of Distributed
Execution and Information Collection by George Athanasopoulos, Aphrodite
Tsalgatidou, Pigi Kouki, Ioannis Pogkas, Michael Pantazoglou
12. A new Approach to Collaborative Information Processing in Complex
Environmental Management Problems by Gregor Pavlin, Michiel Kamermans,
and Kees Nieuwenhuis
13. Supporting Content Provision in Environmental Information Infrastructures by
Sven Schade and Laura Díaz
5 Outcomes
The workshop succeeded in involving several EU funded projects that are currently
building components of infrastructures and platforms for environmental monitoring in
Europe (see http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/sustainable-growth/environment_en.html
for a list of projects in this area). The paper presentations and discussions during the
workshop helped to identify common elements and differences between these projects
in terms of generic components such as development of ontologies and conceptual
models, service discovery and composition, sensor access and stream processing,
visualization, multilingualism, interoperability, contributions to standards and
security. The list of projects present at the workshop and the covered areas are
presented in the below table.
Ontologies / (Service) (Service) Sensors access (Web) Multilingualism Transformation / Standards Security
domain models discovery Composition / streams visualization mapping contributions
TATOO X X X
PESCADO X X X
UncertWeb X X X
SUDPLAN X X
HYDROSYS X X
NETMAR X X X X X X
OEPI X X X
GENESIS-DEC X X X X X X
LARKC X X
ENVISION X X X X X X X X
DIADEM X X X X
Through this, we were able to document the current state of the art and identify the
next steps in research towards a common infrastructure for discovery and chaining of
distributed environmental services. The workshop clearly showed that further effort is
needed to align and ensure a smooth integration of the various components developed
in these projects. Nevertheless, the workshop fostered a greater understanding of how
open environmental service infrastructures can enable enhanced collaboration
between public authorities, businesses and the general public for a better management
of the environment and its natural resources. As a result, it was decided to organize a
new edition of the workshop in 2011, with various focused group meeting between
the members of the various projects until the next edition of the workshop.
6 Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the ENVIROINFO 2010 organization for giving us the
opportunity to organize this Workshop. Many thanks go to all those that submitted
papers, and particularly to the contributing authors. Our gratitude also goes to the
paper reviewers and the members of the ENVIP 2010 Program Committee, for their
timely and accurate reviews and for their help in improving the selected papers.
Finally we would like to acknowledge the EU funded research project ENVISION
(Environmental Services Infrastructure with Ontologies, Project No: 249120) that has
helped supporting this workshop. Further pointers to the continued work on
harmonisation of results in this area with identification of common requirements and
enabling technologies can be found at the ENVISION website, www.envision-
project.eu