E-MAIL
Environmental Management Architecture for
Information delivery
Keywords: Information management
systems, geodata integration, floods,
industrial risks, land useEnvironmental Management Architecture for Information delivery
Application site: Arno river basin, I; Greater Lyon, F; Fife region,Scotland, UK; Corfu,Gr
Website: http://www.rd1.epsilon.com.gr/email
or http://www.aat.it
E-mail: ebi@acm.org
Context
In the increasing concern for the environment, the
co-operation among different administrations and
agencies becomes more and more important. In
such a process environmental planners need to
achieve better quality, higher efficiency and cost-effectiveness
in the environment decision making
process. To satisfy such requirements in the
environmental data management, an appropriate
geodata integration represents the main challenge
for sharing geographic information more effectively
between persons and organisations, for
manipulating geodata in different ways on different
computer systems to obtain analysis results and
reports.
Objectives
The main aim of E-MAIL is to develop a telematics
application supporting decision makers in public
organisation dealing with environment. The
objective is to develop a tool able to assist
environmental monitoring and planning by:
- using data captured by different sources
- converting the data into standardised formats
- integrating the resulting data on a multimedia platform which provide a set of tools for modelling, mapping,analysing and reporting
Results
The Tuscany area represents a case for flash-floods
prevention, where the E-MAIL application supports
the management, updating and maintenance of the
Master Plan for the Arno River Basin. The Master
Plan is a set of documents, rules and laws which are
issued by the Arno River Basin Authority in co-operation
with the Tuscany Regional Government.
The Master Plan rules all the activities relating to the Arno river basin such as hydraulic risks, water quality, building construction allowances. The application provides telematics support to flood prevention (hydraulic risk) by addressing user needs for better access to spatial data, direct and spontaneous interaction with mapped data, visualisation of data, simple overlays, and database querying, as well as to support inter-agency collaboration (broadly speaking some 200 local, regional, and government administrations are involved in the management of this area).Users can retrieve all information in a faster and more simple way (and have more time to formulate ideas, call when specific questions arise, review the available data, and enter recommendations). Moreover, they can be highly involved in the creation of new information through the analysis and combination of existing primary data to develop their own derivative information, such as feature coincidence, buffer zone maps, or impact area calculations.
The E-MAIL application in the Planning Service of Fife Council complements existing stand-alone GIS facilities available in various service offices. The availability and accessibility of such GIS information is thus restricted to the potential group who could take advantage of it. In addition, several datasets of regional importance, and held only at the offices of the Planning Service in Glenrothes and not in GIS format. The data include extensive biological and archaeological records as well as aerial photographic coverage of Fife at both 1:10,000 and 1:5,000 scale.
The E-MAIL application integrates many of these disparate datasets, and make them available to users' desktop computers through an intranet service. The service implements a dataset catalogue (derived from the E-MAIL Geodata Model) which allows a user to select map features via metadata queries in order to generate an interactive map which displays those layers. The interactivity of the map allows typical GIS functionalities, such as zooming, panning and selection of features (or objects) on the map. Users are able to report on attribute data associated with features selected on the map and to save generated maps for re-use or sharing. The emphasis of the application is to simplify access to complex datasets, Therefore, a series of standard maps are incorporated to allow more routine enquiries, such as the determination of ownership details for land allocated in the Council's Housing Plan.
Lyon is France's second largest metropolitan area, and the second most important industrial region in France. The SPIRAL and the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry need to widely disseminate updated water quality and pollution data for Industrial Risk Management planning. The services provided by E-Mail to the Lyon application are divided in 3 categories: general in formation about SPIRAL organisation; environmental preservation and protection information to improve the quality of areas; to provide the users, through a GIS interface, with information about industrial risks, water quality and air quality.
The application provides a direct access to environment information through the GIS application: information about industries in the Lyon areas, and description of their participation on environmental protection, historical measures of the water quality with four classes of attributes:the «milieu naturel»,the «bryophyte», the «sédiments» and the «matières en suspension»; historical measures of the air quality.
In Corfu (Greece) the system is able to track, record and show, in a meaningful way, information about the activities for the storage and processing of liquid, solid and hazardous urban and rural waste types, which is of great concern for their impact on the environment. Another area that is of great interest, is tourist activity, hotspots and more specifically the hotel resorts and their activities which can provide information for use in future land-use planning.
The main project outputs which can be easily transferred are below listed.
Methodology for User Requirement Collection and Analysis, based on the combination of quantitative (questionnaires) and qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups).
System Architecture based on ISO standards, such as ISO/ODP (Open Distributed Processing) 10746 and ISO TC211.
Data Warehousing tools specifically addressing the interoperability of geodata, i.e. , allowing the integration of geo-data from different sources (census, internal data, e t c.) often residing on different systems (Unix-based such as Arc/Info, mainframe/legacy systems, end-user PC etc.) in order to achieve a full geo-data ware house functionality in a distributed environment using a Web interface.
A common set of tools for data analysis, synthesis, interpretation, knowledge discovery, visualisation and collaboration.
E-MAIL gives a synthetic picture of the environmental situation and the capability to cope with different user profiles; it makes available more secondary data (analysis and query results) with respect to basic data,it improves digitalisation.
It allows a better dissemination of information and spatial information usage, and it copes with heterogeneity.
Technical characteristics
E-MAIL allows direct end-users access to GIS data
via Internet/Intranet/Extranet, integrating geo-data
from different sources (census, internal data, etc.)
often located on different systems (Unix-based
Arco/Info, legacy systems, end-users PC, etc.) in
o rder to achieve full geo-data ware h o u s e
functionality in a distributed environment.
System architecture of E-MAIL.
An example E-MAIL session shows how a user can compile his/her personal mix of geographic data, bypassing the specialist command line interface of most GIS systems. The user can navigate in catalogues of metadata where he/she can pick up geographic data just by checking them. Data preview enables viewing of data prior and after selection. The personal map is built "on the fly" and can be viewed in full-detail. Zooming in and out in a number of ways (by selection, by scale, by extent, etc) is possible by querying map components. This might be to ascertain associated data, e.g. census data associated with industrial images and movies related to a flooded location. Map details and associated data can be used, for instance to set up a report that is sent by the user via electronic mail to colleagues for further discussion and analysis. In addition, the user can access databases of laws and directives to check, for instance, whether some areas are protected against construction. Using the same interface, the user can also look for internal d o c u m e n t s , for instance concerning previous versions of the Arno River Master Plan.
Transferability
The E-MAIL applications can be transferred to any
European area, facing environmental management
problems in river basins (flood prevention),
industrial area, rural area pressured by tourism.
Potential user groups could be any environmental
managers handling information, e.g. regional/city
environmental planners, civil protection specialists,
etc.
The E-MAIL tools provide a further level of transferability by addressing different categories of users. By allowing the interoperability of geodata (including access, retrieval, query, store, display information throughout distributed systems),the E-MAIL tools can be used to implement general map-based interface services. For example, E-MAIL provides such tools for implementing the IA 1011 TITAN services, a project designed to deploy services to citizens and SMEs (tools which are transferable to other sites are also included).
The transferability costs involved, apart from the product costs, involve consultancy and training.
The only bottleneck which can occur when all the elements are transferred to a new site is related strictly to the definition of administrative tasks, administration rules being very different according to different laws/rules existing in EU and CEE countries.
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The Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe
