The Growing Importance of Open Service Platforms for the Design of Environmental Information Systems

Environmental Information Systems (EIS) play a key role in our understanding of the past, current and future status of the environment. In the last 10-15 years, the design of EIS has undergone fundamental changes following both the requirements of the users and the capabilities of the underlying information technologies (IT). This paper first identifies three major trends that have determined these changes: 1) integration of several thematic domains to support interdisciplinary environmental tasks, 2) distribution of EIS to a wider spectrum of users, and 3) permanent functional enrichment with sophisticated functions such as environmental simulations or geo-processing capabilities. It then deduces from these trends the need and the growing importance of open service platforms based on international geospatial standards for the EIS design and its operation. In particular, the open geospatial service architecture of the European research project ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk management) is presented in the context of the Web service architectures of the standardisation organisations W3C, OASIS and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The paper concludes with an overview about ongoing research topics such as the integration of sensor networks, the exploitation of semantic technologies and design methodologies for service-centric computing.