HEIS-MUC
Health and
Environmental Information
System Munich
Keywords:environmental and health
information for city administration and
publicHealth and Environmental Information System Munich
Application site: Munich, De
Website: http://www.muenchen.de
Context
Since the Department of Environmental Protection
at the City of Munich Authority has been created, an
environmental information facility called
"Umweltladen" (Environment Information Shop)
collected and disseminated information. The
department mostly used printed paper and personal
communication as a means to inform and make
people aware of environmental issues.
In 1991, an environmental atlas for the City of Munich was compiled. This has been twice upgraded, and it now it contains about 70 maps and related texts describing the environmental situation. About 1300 copies of the Umweltatlas have been printed and distributed, mostly free to administrations, universities, schools etc. In 1998 the Department of Environment merged with the Department of Health. The objective is to build a health and environmental information system and to disseminate the information by means of telematic media to a broad audience since, in accordance with national and EU-regulations, a task of the communities is to provide environmental information to the public.
The environmental problems present in the city of Munich are most common with the other big cities in Europe. The city of Munich has more that 1 million of inhabitants with a small percentage of green areas (8% of the total area is public green space) while 17% is allocated to transport routes. Pollution of groundwater has risen in the last decade. Since 800,000 cars and trucks are crossing the city borders daily, the traffic induced air pollution is a major problem in the city.
Objectives
The main objectives when designing HEIS-Munich
consisted in:
- using present GIS-data and knowledge
- data-mining on present textual and
- alphanumeric data
- preparation of a multi-targeted information delivery policy
- minimizing additional hard- and software costs
- staying free of platform dependency as much as possible.
Results
The Environmental Protection Department of
Munich has a large amount of datasets aggregated in
different ways and for a wide range of
environmental sectors. The project offers the
possibility to disseminate environmental
information, especially the environment atlas, by
means of new telematic applications, i.e. Internet
and CD-ROM format, in a homogeneous and
ergonomical structure to different user groups with
different levels of telematics education.
The system supports administration in gathering,
compilation, and providing information to end-users.
For data-collection and pre-processing of
data, the project includes the following
characteristics.
The data/information are acquired from the cities that own the environmental database, ranging from the monitoring stations, from external sources of data or from specific information systems, as well as from other national sources of information (e.g. the Bavarian Ministry of Environment, the Fe d e r a l Institute for Radiation Protection and the Federal Office of the Environment, etc.). The data consists of geo-referenced data, geographical maps, results of measurements, on-line measurements, time series, statistical evaluations, meta-data, categorised data or original data, simplified data and summarised results (from different calculations). Data management includes:
- Accessibility to all necessary data on different
city topics, archived data as well as time
dependent data (i. e., city air quality), including
easy and quick access to remote databases
when needed
Capability of production of synthetic information through aggregation, modelling and interpretation of the basic data collected, in such a way that it becomes useful for the end-user, and
Presentation and especially visualisation on multimedia (including audio representations) of the environmental parameters in a convenient, easily accessible and understandable way for non-specialists such as the decision makers or the citizens.
During the summer automated email-warnings are generated to radio-stations and newspapers when the ozone level tops a certain level.
For the information delivery, the project is focussed on:
- Aggregation and disaggregation of available information
- The standardisation of the information towards aggregating and integrating different levels of heterogeneous data and information ("synthetic" picture)
- the standardisation of meta-data, for the creation of a searchable database, accessible at distributed sites.
Intranet
The complete "Umweltatlas" has been converted
into WWW format. For the Intranet, an
ArcView/ESRI based, but simplified, map viewing
program is available which allows layer selection,
zooming/panning and information retrieval of the
maps and linkage to the Oracle database.This client
based map viewer will be replaced by a server-sided
m apping facility based on MapObjects/ESRI to
ensure complete independence of the client
Software.
Online data are also transferred from two ozone measurement facilities while automatic warnings are generated (and checked) in case the permitted limits are exceeded. Connection to several other Bavarian measurement sites is currently underway. Additional data includes health, Agenda 21, energy, recycling, as well as a meta-data catalogue. The Intranet is used for intra-administration information purposes as well as for the evaluation of the Internet pages. All the Intranet information are available to all departments of administration in the City of Munich connected to the central core.
Internet
Most of the Intranet pages are copied to the
Internet site, with the exception of the map viewer
which is replaced by gif images of the maps. The air
pollution-values are shown on the main page in a
'ticker-like' fashion and in-depth on lower- level
pages, which allow a comparison of past values. For
feedback, e-mail addresses are provided on every
page.
Public-Access PC/Info Kiosks
These facilities mirror the Internet site, but are
limited to local WWW addresses. The Public-Access-
PC in the 'Environmental Information Shop'
uses the same map-viewing-tool as that used in the
Intranet, and therefore offers enhanced viewing
capability over the classical small-scale paper maps
of the "Umweltatlas".
Infoscreen
Online data concerning ozone air pollution
(summer) and NO2 (winter) are displayed on
infoscreen-terminals (about 3 x 4m beamer
screens) in Munich's subway stations.
Automated Air Pollution E-mail Warnings
Until 1998, information on warnings, which were
caused by exceeding ozone value limits according to
the environmental protection legislation, we re
exchanged by fax. This method has now been
replaced by automated e-mail warnings, since most
receivers have e-mail addresses.
The system is operational daily on the Intranet of the Environmental Protection Department of Munich City. The system is "ready to go" in Internet and Public Info Kiosk.
Technical characteristics
To achieve platform independency and cut software
costs, SGML was chosen as main concept to build
and re-use textual data. The language PERL was
selected for all data-conversion, network-transfer
tasks and database connection via its DBI interface.
These platforms are supported by Gnu EMACS as
editor and integrated development environment.
Oracle is used for the database.
Existing geodata is maintained by ArcInfo.ArcView is used as rapid development tool for mapserver-maps, while the mapserver is based on map-objects.
Currently all computers are connected via a tcp-ip based LAN. External monitoring stations are polled via conventional telephone lines, while data transfer with the internet-mapserver-computer is done by an ISDN line.
A result of the chosen software is the possibility to implement the system on Unix as well as 32bit Windows. Even the database can be (and is, for example on the internet map server) replaced by an SQL enabled ODBC Interface.
While Unix is the preferred for the operating system, for the mapserver-software the best choice is to Windows NT, because the MapObjects-toolkit is available only for Windows 32bit.
The actual configurations is as follows:
The unix host is used from the development PC's via Excursion X-Window - Emulation. The Alpha Server is equipped with about 20 GB disk space, 2 CPUs and 750 MB RAM and runs under DEC OSF1. Additionally to the HEIS work it does disk and print serving for about 150 PCs. The Personal Computers are equipped with 64 MB RAM and run under WinNT 4. The Telematics-Server runs WinNT as well, but an alternative choice of LINUX should be considered in order to achieve more stability. The internet webserver is run by another part of the administration of the city of Munich. The internet mapserver is at the moment hosted by the technical university of Munich, and it runs under WinNT. If the case that Mapserver-Software should use Java, a change to LINUX is to be considered. For security reasons there is no direct connection between Intranet and Telematics-Server, Internet and Intranet.
Transferability
The basic components of the Munich Health and
Environmental Information System could be used in
all city or town administrations in west and east
Europe for a robust health and environmental
information for the public. This type of systems
could also be used as an information system
between city's/towns, between city's and national
and international administrations, from
administrations to academic/research departments.
Do you have a comment, reaction or opinion regarding what you've read? If so, please leave it at the online discussion board!
Do you have a comment, reaction or opinion regarding what you've read? If so, please leave it at the online discussion board!
The Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe
