Environmental Software Systems. Fostering Information Sharing

Different initiatives focused on spatial data in Europe should not be isolated but closely connected. The portfolio of such initiatives is very extensive. On the one hand, it covers all European activities such as INSPIRE or GMES, on the other hand, there are products of modern approaches based on neogeography and Volunteered Geographic Information (e.g. OpenStreetMap). Data are published by various regional or local authorities, non-governmental organisations, public bodies, research projects as well as by different commercial subjects. The focus of the HABITATS project was to build an environment that enables to share and combine data in order to reach new data, information and knowledge. On the basis of different pilots, HABITATS defined and tested harmonisation rules for spatial environmental data and designed the concept of Reference Laboratory as a tool for testing the interoperability and supporting unification of outputs cross different pilots.

Wildfire information has long been collected in Europe, with particular focus on forest fires. The European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS) of the European Commission complements and harmonises the information collected by member countries and covers the forest fire management cycle. This latter ranges from forest fire preparedness to post-fire impact analysis. However, predicting and simulating fire event dynamics requires the integrated modelling of several sources of uncertainty. Here we present a case study of a novel conceptualization based on a Semantic Array Programming (SemAP) application of the Dynamic Data Driven Application Systems (DDDAS) concept. The case study is based on a new architecture for adaptive and robust modelling of wildfire behaviour. It focuses on the module for simulating wildfire dynamics under fire control scenarios. Rapid assessment of the involved impact due to carbon emission and potential soil erosion is also shown. Uncertainty is assessed by ensembling an array of simulations which consider the uncertainty in meteorology, fuel, software modules. The event under investigation is a major wildfire occurred in 2012, widely reported as one of the worst in the Valencia region, Spain. The inherent data, modelling and software uncertainty are discussed and preliminary results of the robust data-driven ensemble application are presented. The case study suitably illustrates a typical modelling context in many European areas – for which timely collecting accurate local information on vegetation, fuel, humidity, wind fields is not feasible – where robust and flexible approaches may prove as a viable modelling strategy.

Climate Twins is a freely accessible Web application which provides easily comprehensible information on the projected climate developments in Europe at a regional level. Climate Twins is based on the idea that an impression of the future climate of a specific region can be received by indicating regions which have a similar present climate. Within the 7th EU FP project "TaToo" ontology-based functionalities have been added to the basic Climate Twins Web application in order to allow users to enrich the original information base - restricted to only two climate parameters (’temperature’ and ’precipitation’) - by themselves by adding any further geo-located information which they consider relevant in the context of a specific local climate (e.g. information on local vegetation and fauna). This kind of crowdsourcing information raises the problem of safeguarding the quality of the added information. In this paper the authors show how the domain ontology of Climate Twins can be used to semantically validate the coherence of new entries in order to prevent incorrect links.

In terms of contemporary civilization development one of the key aspects of environmental protection is the effort to avoid wasting resources. In the case of environmental information systems there is a necessity to strive for such systems, which deliver the highest benefits with the lowest possible consumption of resources (material, energy, as well as human, etc.). Therefore, every information system must be regarded comprehensively, i.e. as a set of mutually interactive subsystems (components, parts). The experiences confirm that the information system, parts of which are not mutually balanced, leads to the lower effectiveness and efficiency of the system as a whole in contrast with a system which may be managed in such a way that all its parts are maintained at a comparable level. Thus, the effectiveness of environmental/information systems must be harmonized as a whole. This paper presents “the HOS method” developed in the Faculty of Business and Management of the Brno University of Technology. This method enables the primary assessment of the balance of organizations’ information systems. The HOS analysis is based on a considering of the basic subsystems: Hardware, Orgware and Software (hence the title HOS), but also the following subsystems: Peopleware, Dataware, Customers, Suppliers and Information System Management. The understandable and transparent HOS diagrams for assessing the balance of an information system are presented in a short case study where authors submit also some selected statistics about their current survey results obtained by means of empirical measurement of approximately four hundred chosen organizations from the Czech Republic and Slovak republic. The research is realized using the Zefis portal.

This paper describes the application of PROMETHEE-GAIA methodology in a multiple criteria analysis to rank potential environmental investments in mineral-processing companies. The intent of the paper is to identify best technical facilities on the basis of preferential relations between a set of variants. The method of Total Cost Analysis (TCA) was chosen to define the criteria. The economic and environmental costs, as well as the benefits of these technical facilities, were determined by means of this method. PROMETHEE is one of the methods in the Multi Criteria Analysis (MCA) category. The MCA, as the name implies, deals with the evaluation of a number of variants by several criteria. The technical facility was selected by a comparative analysis involving five influential parameters (Investment Costs, Annual Operating Costs, Operating Income, Administrative Costs and Disposal Fees, Economic and Environmental Benefits). As expected, the analysis resulted in a preferential ranking of these technical facilities.

We discuss how Delft-FEWS is applied to incorporate real-time sensor data and dynamic modeling to allow Real Time Control (RTC) of three sewer systems in the area of the Hoeksche Waard, the Netherlands. The purpose of this project was to reduce sewerage spilling to the surface water by optimizing the available storage in the sewer systems. In this paper we will present how Delft-FEWS makes use of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) webservices to exchange real-time data with multiple sewer systems and their different Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. We will also explain how we combine this with dynamic models, allowing for central automatic control of multiple sewer systems.

Air quality and air pollution have a very large impact on human health. The sensitivity to different pollutants varies per person, therefore it is important that citizens can get personalised air quality information. The Personal Environmental Information System (PEIS) aims at delivering just that. The PEIS takes sensor data from several data providers and employs a service-oriented architecture to deliver these observations to the user through a smartphone application. The PEIS also uses scientific models to fuse the sensor data and create new, derived observations. To make scientific models that fuse sensor data fit better in a service-oriented architecture, a software framework called Fusion4Decision was developed. This framework is based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards and allows scientific models written in languages like MATLAB or R to be available as a web service.

TaToo – Tagging tool based on a semantic discovery framework, a project funded by the European Commission provides a web-based solution for easy and accurate discovery as well as tagging of environmental resources. The novelty relies on a semantic framework integrating different domain ontologies in a multi-domain and multilingual context. The underlying ontology framework, comprises besides the different domain ontologies (e.g. related to climate change, agro-environmental and anthropogenic impact domains) also concepts and methods to establish a mapping between the domain ontologies and so-called minimal environmental resource model (MERM). Together this forms a suitable and usable bridge ontology allowing a cross-domain discovery by using aligned ontologies concepts from different domains. The clear advantage for the end-user is that he is now able to find relevant information stemming from other domains, (like from impact of pollutant, climate change or temperature on human health) that he would not have found before but would be even more important to him that the ones only from his domain of expertise. The TaToo semantic framework extends cross-domain search evolving towards the Linked Data initiative by providing a linking functionality. The cross-domain search can be extended including in the search results also linked resources.

In order to meet the requirements for observational biodiversity data, new sources of data must be enabled; for this purpose, new tools will be required. In order to effectively implement such tools, standardized building blocks such as the enablers defined by the FI will be very valuable. Thus, it is of utmost urgency that the requirements posed by the biodiversity sector are clearly structured and made available for implementation of environmental enablers within the FI. The ENVIROFI project has gone to great lengths so provide these requirements for various environmental domains; of specific relevant to this paper being the biodiversity domain. We hope to successfully contribute to the future of e-Environment in this manner.

Sensors are used in environmental science to monitor an increasingly large multitude of properties of real world phenomena. An important scientific aim of such monitoring is more accurate and more complete understanding of phenomena, with respect to, e.g., their formation, development, or interactions. Properties and phenomena may be, for instance, mass or concentration and particulate matter or eutrophication, respectively. Typically, measurement data must undergo considerable processing in order to become useful to a scientific aim. We outline the architecture and implementation of an ontology-based environmental software system for the automated representation of knowledge for real world situations acquired from measurement data. We evaluate and discuss the system for the automated representation of knowledge for situations of atmospheric new particle formation. Such knowledge is acquired from measurement data for the particle size distribution of a polydisperse aerosol, as measured by a differential mobility particle sizer.

This paper motivates the enablement of the Future Internet to become a highly functional service platform supporting the design and the operation of software applications in the Environmental Information Space. It reports on the experience made by the European research project ENVIROFI as one of the usage area projects within the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership programme. It describes the software components (environmental and specific enablers) which are required to connect with the domain-independent capabilities (generic enablers) of the Future Internet core platform for geospatially and environmentally-driven applications.

Nitrogen application is a standard practice for maximizing productivity of an agronomic system. The challenge is that many commercial scale agricultural systems are inefficient in utilizing the nitrogen that is applied. Therefore, understanding the impact of land management practices on nitrogen use inefficiencies within the agroecosystem is critical. This paper presents an integrated model that quantifies the impact of various land management practices on specific agroecosystem units. This integrated model is composed of the Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS), the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation, Version 2 (RUSLE2), the Soil Condition Index (SCI), and the daily CENTURY model, DAYCENT. The integrated model was used to determine the impact of land management strategies on greenhouse gas emissions and nitrate leaching in a 60.5 ha field in Webster County, Iowa, USA. It was found that nitrogen use efficiency can vary significantly across a field and that integrated land management strategies can reduce overall nitrogen losses.

Smart monitoring, using real-time environmental sensing with links to server-side data processing/modeling, allows progression from data acquisition to useful information generation. The use of modern technology such as mobile phones to provide imagery and other types of data along with GPS-derived coordinates enables researchers and stakeholders to integrate ground-based observations with existing datasets. We have developed an infrastructure linking mobile communications, server-side processing and storage of data and imagery, and field-based access to existing spatial datasets. This infrastructure has been used for the development of a number of mobile phone apps (applications) and web-based applications, and has proved useful for stakeholders in agriculture, science and policy. In addition to giving information on the capacity development, we demonstrate useful applications relating to the upload, interpretation and integration of data (e.g. automated interpretation of soil profile imagery, carbon content estimation from soil colour) while focusing on the technical aspects of the underpinning system.

We investigate how smart Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) solutions can be used for combating illegal logging and timber trade. We put together techniques from agile requirements engineering to propose a methodology for identifying user stories and associated risks and priorities and via a collaborative, participatory, single day workshop, named

inception workshop

. We present our findings from the first application of the method, with the active involvement of the relevant stakeholders, i.e technical and domain experts, which concluded in seven user stories.

The diffusion of electric vehicles is currently the most promising opportunity to reduce the dependency on fossil fuel in the mobility sector. However, the adoption of the electric vehicles seems to be still hindered by psychological and behavioural barriers. Thus, in order to understand and to foster the transition towards more sustainable mobility styles, it becomes essential to adopt an inter-disciplinary approach. In this framework, the e-mobiliTI project was launched in late 2012 in Southern Switzerland. It aims at understanding the potential for transition in the mobility system at the local level, with a special focus on electric mobility. The project builds upon a small living lab made up of around twenty families, who will be monitored in all their trips through smart mobile devices, in order to get quantitative data, and through focus groups, in order to get qualitative data and perceptions.

Here we discuss the major challenge in the initial stage of the e-mobiliTI project, that is the gathering of reliable and high-quality data on users’ behaviour. We describe the automatic tracking system, and the data processing and the qualitative assessment approach and comment on the overall performances of the living lab experiment.

A great majority of the EU citizens already owns a cellular phone. An increasing part of these phones are smartphones with a broadband internet connection. This growing network of smart internet enabled devices could act as a dense sensing network, as well as a tool for individual informing and tasking of mobile citizens and volunteers.

In order to fully harvest this new resource, we need to understand its rules and develop adequate tools. This paper lists some of the peculiarities of ad-hoc volunteer networks supported by smartphones. It furthermore compares the capabilities and limitations of these networks with other means of observation gathering and activity coordination. This includes: (1) a reflection on the motivation for users participation; (2) human and technical limitations of smartphone-enabled volunteer networks; (3) legal and ethical challenges; (4) reliability and usability issues; as well as (5) issues related to trust and quality of information.

The second part of the paper presents our experiences with design and prototypic development of the tools supporting volunteer efforts in the field of environmental monitoring, e-health and crisis management. This development is presented in a wider scope of the “Future Internet Public Private Partnership” research programme.

Finally, the paper summarizes our findings and recommendations for further developments.

The paper describes an environmental project ZmapujTo (www.ZmapujTo.cz) which is intended to fight against illegal waste dumps in the Czech Republic using a modern, effective and widespread platform. As a supporting tool a smartphone/tablet reporting application ZmapujTo has been developed. This freely available mobile application enables users to report illegal dumps and also overloaded of municipal waste containers. The project ZmapujTo is intended for all people who want to live in a clean environment in their cities, villages or countryside and additionally want to raise awareness of unacceptable environmental behaviour of people.

Users of this GIS based mobile application can report illegal dumps quickly and easily by using their smartphones/tablets. Thus, everybody can use this interactive public web form to report illegal dumps in the Czech Republic. The objective of this project is to contribute to reduce environmental pollution caused by illegal dumps in the Czech Republic by making available a modern, effective and widespread platform for reporting and monitoring of illegal dumps.

The current procedure for the reporting of cholera cases in Uganda contains many manual steps across several levels of the health infrastructure. Because of this there is a large chance of errors in the information flow, possibly delaying the signalling of an outbreak. The lack of accurate and complete data also hinders research into the spread of cholera. To improve the cholera reporting an application called Dira (Disease Incidence Reporting Application) has been developed for mobile devices, that allows the field registration of patients to be done quickly, easily and accurately. By entering the data directly on an electronic device there is no longer the need for separate digitization steps. By transferring case data directly from the hand-held device to a central server at the Ugandan Ministry of Health, the reliability of the data can be increased and the time to launch a response to an outbreak can be decreased.

This paper describes a universal approach to the development of a cross-platform and multi-functional environmental mobile application. According to the Pareto principle [1] only common use cases are implemented and can be described in a lightweight description format instead of being explicitly programmed. These use cases include information about the environment (“my environment”), reporting of environmental data (“crowd sourcing”), and environmental experience (“electronic nature guide”).

This paper discusses main problems associated with evaluation of performance and impact of long-term environmental programs. Lack of data standards, incompleteness of archived datasets and insufficient statistical power were identified as main limits in functionality of monitoring networks. To avoid these failures, environmental programs should be designed with inception to incorporate data management as their integral part. Especially in global programs, local and regional data managers should invest significant proportion of their effort to handle documentation in terms of standardized coding, data formats, metadata coding and consistency of records over time. Up-to-date trends in building knowledge-based infrastructures are illustrated using example of monitoring of atmospheric pollution by persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Conceptual model usable to facilitate the integration and analysis of data on POPs concentrations is introduced with its multilayer hierarchy of entities (POPs as nomenclature classes, couples “observation – measurement” as content classes). Robust set of statistical methods for processing of time series of concentration data is discussed from the viewpoint of practical implementation within running monitoring programs. It consists of the following components: baseline pollution estimates, uncertainty analyses, spatial extrapolations, effect size estimates, time trend identification and quantification. Development of tools supporting standardized environmental data management is rapidly expanding field of science which results in the following challenges for applied informatics and statistics: log-term sustainability of information systems, data-related metadata coding and archiving, tools for automated integration and reporting of data.

The Global Monitoring Plan for persistent organic pollutants is an important component of the effectiveness evaluation of the Stockholm Convention and its main objective is assessment of long-term changes in POPs concentrations in core matrices – ambient air and human tissues (milk, blood). This paper summarizes results of activities of the Research Centre for Toxic Compounds in the Environment and the Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, which have been performed on the basis of the mandate given by Global Coordination Group for GMP and Secretariat of the Stockholm Convention: content analysis of the GMP monitoring reports published in 2009, on-line visualization tool for browsing and analyzing collected data from the monitoring reports, and proposal of a design of future data collection campaigns.

GENASIS (Global ENvironmental ASsessment and Information System) is the web environmental information system which is an environmental data repository that provides comprehensive information on chemical contamination of the environment by Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). GENASIS combines data from long-term environmental monitoring programmes operated by RECETOX with validated data from partner institutions, and provides data archives, data management services and analytical processing of data. In the past few years the GENASIS system has undergone rapid development and grew up from the data repository into a scientific data infrastructure.

The Global Monitoring Plan (GMP) was established as a tool for providing a worldwide overview of Stockholm Convention (SC) compliance by monitoring and evaluation of SC 22 persistent organic pollutants (POPs) concentration levels and their trends. In order to evaluate a dataset on POPs concentrations from the initial GMP campaign, it was essential to use advanced statistical methods which are not incorporated in commonly used database languages. Instead of a complete realization of these methods in the main programming language, in which the application is developed, this language was used only as an interface to the server version of the powerful statistical software R. The involvement of the R language into the environmental pollution data assessment infrastructure of the Global Environmental Assessment Information System (GENASIS) adopted for the GMP data makes easier to avoid disambiguities in data analysis and brings a powerful tool for advanced statistical analysis and visualization of GMP and GENASIS data.

The current environmental research is producing large quantities of data on all environmental matrices and number of chemical and biological endpoints. However, there is a paradox in this situation that we suffer from lack of representative data, since their production has not been accordingly supported by development of systems that make them accessible for analysis. The introduced GENASIS data browser aims in its current version on the problem of persistent organic pollutants and the analysis, visualization and interpretation of data from their monitoring networks. The development of the GENASIS involves problems of the so called information pyramid: monitoring (obtaining environmental data), data validation (including uncertainty quantification), data analysis, and methods of aggregation of data from different sources, model generalization and interpretation of results, and their presentation. Within the frame of the GENASIS data browser, we introduce a user-friendly system for the visualization and analysis of contamination of all environmental compartments by persistent organic pollutants and evaluation of actual POPs contamination, its long-term trends and seasonal fluctuations. Project outcomes are useful as information source both for lay public and experts, as well as for the process of the Stockholm Convention implementation.

A Catchment Management Tool (CMT) is being developed for the Irish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that will allow River Basin Managers to evaluate the environmental risk from organic and inorganic nutrient loadings due to various land uses and human activities. The CMT was built using Open Source GIS (Geographical Information System) software, to facilitate development and widen the research user-base of the tool. The user interface of the CMT is designed to be flexible to allow local knowledge to be included in the system as well as the possibility to try what-if scenarios in relation to environmental assessment. Contaminant loadings are calculated from publicly available data and hydrogeologically susceptible areas (HSAs) are formed by combining soil and geological GIS layers. Further combinations of Loadings and HSAs allow Critical Source Areas to be delineated that identify areas contributing significant amounts of a given contaminant to any selected water body.

Forest ecosystems play a key role in the global carbon cycle. Spatially explicit data and assessments of forest biomass and carbon are therefore crucial for designing and implementing effective sustainable forest management options and forest related policies. In this contribution, we present European-wide maps of forest biomass and carbon stock spatially disaggregated at 1km x 1km. The maps originated from a spatialisation improvement of the IPCC methodology for estimating the forest biomass at IPCC Tier 1 level (IPCC-T1). Using a categorical map of ecological zones within the mapping technique may originate boundary effects between the ecological zones. This may induce undue artifacts in the outcomes, as evident in previously published maps generated with the IPCC-T1 methodology. Here we present a novel method for IPCC-T1 biomass mapping which mitigates these artifacts. We propose the use of a fuzzy similarity map of the FAO ecological zones computed by estimating the relative distance similarity (RDS) of each grid-cells climate and geography with respect to the FAO ecological zones. A robust ensemble approach was used to merge an array of simple models with spatially distributed fuzzy set-membership. This allowed the boundary artifacts to be reduced, while mitigating the impact of model semantic extrapolation. The chain of semantically enhanced data-transformations is described following the semantic array programming paradigm. Preliminary results obtained from the application of this novel approach are presented along with a discussion of its impact on the derived maps.

Rivers and streams in urban areas are losing their natural environ-mental qualities. A lack of river management and insufficient interest on the part of municipal authorities has become the norm, especially in the case of small watercourses. Here, an interdisciplinary approach to landscape-level degradation is applied to selected catchments in the Czech Republic (the streams known as the Lačnovský and the Leskava). This approach includes basic geographical approaches to the quantification of the relationship between anthropogenic pressure and ecological stability. The methods employed include hy-dromorphological field research, identification of changes in land use, and an inventory of anthropogenic landforms.

The existence of urban stream syndrome was established in model catchments. Parameters for these areas were compared with values for susceptibility to natural risk and preliminary results show a spatial pattern consistent with the areas at most risk also being prone to flooding. The observations were subjected to cartographic visualization and enriched with thematic and temporal uncertainty features, thus refining the results and highlighting any ambiguity.

The environmental protection is currently a very hot topic. The article deals with the perspectives and possibilities for deployment of "new technologies" or already known technologies but in new ways in order to protect selected environment. In the first part, the paper is focused on education and technologies used in the educational process at the University of Defence, at the Department of Civil Protection. The second part outlines the possibilities of using this technology to protect specialized workplaces, which is also applicable to environmental protection.

Awareness, education and protection of organizational information secure environments are currently highly serious and relevant topics. The paper deals with the perspectives and possibilities of "new approaches" to the protection of information and communication systems and nets as a part of Czech Republic critical infrastructure. It means that selected technologies are used, considering new perspectives to interoperable management training and education. The first part of this paper is focused on the current state of organization management information systems in Czech Republic. The second part concentrates on the possibilities of new technologies application and computer-aided tools, protecting information ( communication systems and other assets.

This paper describes the major research and development activities which have been achieved so far since the launch of the DESURBS project (www.desurbs.eu) in 2011. The project focuses on the development of a Decision-Support System Portal (DSSP) which integrates information, data and software modules representing city assets, hazards and processing models that simulate exposures to risks and potential compromise to safety and security. The use of the DSSP will aid the design of safer and more resilient urban spaces. Specifically, it provides security related scenarios with contextual information to support various types of users who specialise in urban spatial design and planning. The DSSP is a web enabled system which is also adapted to mobile devices usage. It is supported with geographic maps and visualised aggregated data from a number of heterogeneous sources. A responsive web design which adapts to the resolution of smart mobile devices has also been achieved. That is, low powered mobiles can still provide map oriented data in a responsive fashion, while using multiple platforms (Android and iOS currently). The first DSSP prototype employs the United Kingdom crime statistics feed of year 2012 and analyses crime trends in 13 English Cities (including Greater London) which are distributed into four major-regions. The DSSP displays raw crime data via a marker on a map, while they are aggregated under specific crime type threads and visualised as “heat maps”. The specific visualisations are aligned to the various administrative regions such as neighbourhoods, catchments and postcodes. It also allows users to explore historical crime trends for a region over time, where crime statistics are contrasted. The scalability of the DSSP was also tested under increasingly large datasets and numbers of users, with tested loads on the map server and the main Django user application. The difference in speed between the mobile and desktop interfaces for a defined set of tasks using the application shall also be performed and presented in the near future.

Landslide susceptibility assessment is a fundamental component of effective landslide prevention. One of the main challenges in landslides forecasting is the assessment of spatial distribution of landslide susceptibility. Despite the many different approaches, landslide susceptibility assessment still remains a challenge. A semi-quantitative method is proposed combining heuristic, deterministic and probabilistic approaches for a robust catchment scale assessment. A fuzzy ensemble model has been exploited for aggregating an array of different susceptibility zonation maps. Each susceptibility zonation has been obtained by applying heterogeneous statistical techniques as logistic regression (LR), relative distance similarity (RDS), artificial neural network (ANN) and two different landslide susceptibility techniques based on the infinite slope stability model. The sequence of data-transformation models has been enhanced following the semantic array programming paradigm. The ensemble has been applied to a study area in Italy. This catchment scale methodology may be exploited for analysing the potential impact of landscape disturbances. At regional scale, a qualitative approach is also proposed as a rapid assessment technique – suitable for application in real-time operations such as wildfire emergency management.

RainPortal (http://sudplan.ait.ac.at/RainPortalServer) is a web portal that has three main targets: 1) Provide access to scientifically sound data related to some key climate change aspects in Europe, 2) Provide concrete data about climate change related local precipitation changes by using climate model output and 3) Easy usage and incorporation of the provided information into existing planning workflows.

Based on governmental institutions and strong volunteer organizations, Austria provides a comprehensive and well developed emergency response system. As an important factor for the maintenance of the current quality standard of Austria’s protection and emergency system, the further engagement of voluntariness has to be ensured and enhanced in the light of the ongoing societal change. On the one hand, the involvement of new media provides opportunities to expand the organizations’ service portfolio to create a broader participation for citizens’ engagement; on the other hand, long lasting and formal memberships are often a challenge for the current dynamic lifestyle. To face this situation, the involvement of new media services for volunteer management in order to enable new modes of voluntary binding is a promising strategically effort. A new process called “crowdtasking” dedicated to the improvement of volunteer management applying new media is discussed; new processes of volunteer management are presented by exemplary initiatives of humanitarian non-governmental organizations, such as the Austrian Red Cross.

In this article we discuss the route planning of Hazardous Materials (HAZMAT). For HAZMAT transportation, safety and security is of utmost importance. Because of this, the route planning needs to consider potential risks and costs to find an optimal route for the transportation. It has been shown that the route planning is an NP hard problem. In this article, we approach the problem from a novel point of the view. As the main contribution, we present in this article a GIS-based route planing method that has many complementary advantages to graph-based route planning methods. We also illustrate the use of the method with a simple case study.

Wildfires in Europe – especially in the Mediterranean region – are one of the major treats at landscape scale. While their immediate impact ranges from endangering human life to the destruction of economic assets, other damages exceed the spatio-temporal scale of a fire event. Wildfires involving forest resources are associated with intense carbon emissions and alteration of surrounding ecosystems. The induced land cover degradation has also a potential role in exacerbating soil erosion and shallow landslides. A component of the complexity in assessing fire impacts resides in the difference between uncontrolled wildfires and those for which a control strategy is applied. Robust modelling of wildfire behaviour requires dynamic simulations under an array of multiple fuel models, meteorological disturbances and control strategies for mitigating fire damages. Uncertainty is associated to meteorological forecast and fuel model estimation. Software uncertainty also derives from the data-transformation models needed for predicting the wildfire behaviour and its consequences. The complex and dynamic interactions of these factors define a context of deep uncertainty. Here an architecture for adaptive and robust modelling of wildfire behaviour is proposed, following the semantic array programming paradigm. The mathematical conceptualisation focuses on the dynamic exploitation of updated meteorological information and the design flexibility in adapting to the heterogeneous European conditions. Also, the modelling architecture proposes a multi-criteria approach for assessing the potential impact with qualitative rapid assessment methods and more accurate a-posteriori assessment.

In this article, we discuss integration of distributed information services, to support the implementation of applications for fields of safety and security. Although there are standard interfacing technologies, such as SOAP and REST, there is very little architectural support for the development of personalized and case specific applications, where the same data sources and computational services are integrated in different ways. As the main contribution, we present here a distributed service architecture, called TiTiMaKe, that supports the development of scenario based applications. We also illustrate TiTiMaKe by describing its use in applications in fields of surveillance and emergency rescue.

The Environmental risk management is an important component of governmental environmental policies. Alternative mechanisms for achieving cost-effective environmental risk reduction have been discussed in environmental economics. The paper presents a relatively new approach to environmental risk management – a model of negotiation between polluters and authorities under information asymmetry when also economic instruments are applied. A combinatory model that serves computing the first best solution was developed. The CRAB software (CombinatoRial Auction Body Software System) was used for this model. The computed first best solution was compared to the results of small economic laboratory experiments. Students played the role of the subjects in the experiments. The research concluded that under economic pressure in the form of known limitation of financial resources, the experiment results are closer to minimal financial supports. Even in a one-round game, a more cost-effective solution is achieved compared to experiments where such limitation was not introduced.

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) defines the quality goals for European water bodies until 2027. Water bodies are managed on very different governmental levels in the member states. Due to the federal system, Germany has a complex structure of responsibilities regarding the management and maintenance of water bodies in Europe.

The paper will present a highly integrated information system to support water body management in the context of the WFD. The system was designed and developed for the German federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The objective was to provide a state-wide information platform accessible through an environmental information system (EIS) for all activities related to the water body management, including the maintenance of the water body network itself, managing related information regarding statistics, agriculture and environmental protection, as well as water body quality like chemical and biological status.

This EIS integrates disparate data sources from a large number of individual providers through standardized services. Moreover, the EIS provides a homogenous view on very different data regarding their topic, content, structure and spatial reference and supports all WFD reporting related workflows.

This paper deals with cross-domain environmental aspects of noise mapping which is commonly understood as a stand-alone initiative. Scientific core of this research lies in the integration of noise mapping with interoperable data sources, where the European Union’s INSPIRE (INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe) Directive is nowadays one of the main.

Principles of noise mapping according to the END (European Noise Directive), OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) CityGML specification, X3D (Extensible 3D) and application schemas in INSPIRE are depicted at the beginning. Special attention is then paid to the specifics of INSPIRE spatial data theme called buildings, including its extension possibilities. Motivations for 3D application schema of INSPIRE buildings are discussed while only 2D application schema is the legally binding one. On the other hand, 3D application schema is recommended by the INSPIRE Technical Guidelines. We also deal with OGC CityGML specification since it is the basis for the 3D application schema. We took a step forward to publish the results of noise mapping based on INSPIRE application schema through X3D technology on the Web. This enables to disseminate information on noise mapping to wide audience through next generation Web applications.

The paper proposes formalised methodology on X3D-based application development through the XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations). Noise mapping was taken as a use case. There are discussions on benefits and limitations of X3D visualization as well as differences between the X3D presentation and storage of 3D geospatial data according to INSPIRE application schema on buildings at the end.

Environmental information systems of the Czech Republic´s Ministry of Environment have been developed since 1990. Creation of the National Information System to Collect and Evaluate Information on Environmental Pollution began in 2010. This project has been co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund. The project is split into three parts: (a) Integrated Reporting System (ISPOP); (b) Environmental helpdesk (EnviHELP) and (c) National INSPIRE Geoportal (Geoportal), which were developed in 2010-2013. In this article, Geoportal as national implementation of the INSPIRE Directive in the Czech Republic is presented in more detail including several usage examples.

The new Air Quality Directive (2008/50/EC) foresees the provision of air quality reporting data utilizing the data specifications and services specified by the INSPIRE Directive (2007/2/EC). For this purpose, existing INSPIRE data specifications must be extended as required to support the legal requirements for air quality e-Reporting. Both the legal background for air quality reporting and INSPIRE as well as the process for extending the INSPIRE data models as required for air quality e-Reporting are described in this paper.

In this paper the authors apply the principles of the HOS method developed at the Faculty of Business and Management at the Brno University of Technology for evaluating the efficiency of information systems including environmental information system (EIS). Selected results of the authors´ research based on monitoring more than four hundred organizations are presented in a case study. The authors also take into account some aspects of the formulation of environmental information of the Czech Republic (supported by, e.g., the Czech Statistical Office). The primary principle of the research is to determine the level of balance of the organization’s information system, this being the key prerequisite of its effectiveness. The effectiveness is understood as maximizing the output with respect to minimizing the total cost. It is a way of implementing information and communication technologies and respecting their characteristics as properties of the information system generally and within the limits of sustainability of their development and implementation throughout their life cycle. Organizations respecting these rules support the use of the tools and state-of-the-art environmental informatics, and thus significantly contribute to their sustainable development.

Results from global and regional climate scenario modelling predict significant changes in temperature and precipitation during the rest of the century. Episodes with extremely high temperatures and more intense rainfall will occur more often. Climate change will affect the urban environment and should be taken into account in long term and sustainable urban planning for adaptation to the new climate conditions. To consider the effects of climate change in today’s planning, tools are needed to support the development of climate change enabled applications. These tools have to support several aspects of application development in the context of EDSS: a) How can the results from climate change models be integrated in today’s applications? b) How to access climate change information? c) How to compare local effects of climate change scenarios? d) How to gain access to downscaling functionality required for local problems? e) How to feed local models with climate scenario data. Or in other words: How to build climate change enabled applications.

Within the FP7 project SUDPLAN, which integrates environmental modelling and software expertise, a system of standardised services and end user applications has been developed. The system delivers long term projections of environmental data for different aspects of local modelling (air quality, hydrological conditions and intense rainfall) based on different climate scenarios. The services are interactive and require input of local observations to improve downscaled projections. This is necessary to support wide applicability as the resolution requirements of local models can be very different. All services are provided through standardized service interfaces. On top of these services, the so-called Scenario Management System (SMS) provides end user components for scenario management, visualisation, model integration as well as wizards to support the relevant workflows and the interaction with common downscaling services. The SMS is based on the geo-spatial application suite CIDS which allows to build decision support systems (DSS) with a focus on using climate change projections in the workflow.

The quality of both, the safety management and the ways of realisation of management tasks, are fundamental importance for ensuring the human security and sustainable development. The capability of correct application of risk management process is important. For assembling the qualified data for the FOCUS, the EU project, it was proposed the tool that leans on method of application of case study at decision-making. The tool has four main parts and it acts for obtaining the qualified groundwork for territory safety management and it can be easy adapted for needs of objects, partial safeties as it is the labour safety and health, and organisations. The paper shows aims of individual steps and linking the partial tools from management domain.

This paper presents two novel web-based applications for disseminating climate change adaptation related information. (i) The

MEDIATION Adaptation Platform

, one of the core outputs of the European FP7 research project MEDIATION (Methodology for Effective Decision-making on Impacts and AdaptaTION), offers a set of decision trees that can be browsed graphically to navigate over adaptation challenges and available types of methods for addressing them. This framework is interlinked both with a Toolbox and a set of case study descriptions. (ii)

ci:grasp-2

, the successor of the BMU-funded Climate Impacts: Global and Regional Adaptation Support Platform (ci:grasp), provides access to a growing pool of global and regional information on climate stimuli and impacts, as well as on adaptation projects. The paper identifies central user tasks for both applications and presents interaction metaphors that have been chosen to support users in fulfilling these tasks.

The paper argues for the integration of engineering and accounting professionals through a transdisciplinary approach to on-farm water issues associated with farm dams. An integrated macro and micro solution is put forward in the context of poor farmer behaviour as spillways are blocked to pursue individual aims at the expense of other stakeholders, including downstream communities and the environment. Integrated engineering accounting is proposed as a solution through transdisciplinary thinking.

Environmental Management Systems (EMS) are important voluntary tools used by the business sphere and other organisations in the world, as well as in the Czech Republic, for the management of the impacts of their activities, products and services on the environment. The article presents EMS as a tool for the management of the environmental aspects and impacts of organisations, depicts the development of their implementation into the practice deployed by organisations around the world and in the Czech Republic in the last 15 years and highlights the systems’ benefits for the society and for the organisations themselves.

Project management is a set of validated and described procedures that comprehensively solve the implementation and management of defined activities that relate to a specific project. In the Czech Republic, the issue of risk management in projects often neglected and began to be more used to the ESF projects where is the risk management required. There are used most often for risk analysis 3 methods - sensitivity analysis, RIPRAN method, scoring method. The following article focuses on risk management methods that are not used in common practice immediately concern to project risk management. The benefit of this paper is the connection between methods used in project management and the methods of risk analysis. The result is an overview of the main advantages and disadvantages of these methods and the possibility of their use in different phases of the project, taking into account the time and cost effectiveness.

The paper will describe the features and show advantages of process orientation in all phases of university course design and implementation applied in an introductory course on environmental science at Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics in Brno, Czech Republic. It will demonstrate the principles of process-oriented learning design and its support in the open-source based Medusy project. Primarily, it will show the integrated approach to learning process design, tooling, runtime environment, and learning process pattern repository.

In this article the diversity of environmental monitoring systems is studied. The number of such systems is steadily increasing each year, as systems are tailored to specific, growing needs of authorities, corporate users and citizens. Because of this, it becomes harder to compare systems and their functionality. Systems that appear to have the same functionality may turn out to be tailored for different application domains. Likewise, a chosen system may later on turn out to have insufficient support for connectivity and interoperability, although it provides the best support for core functionality requirements. To make sense of the ever growing diversity, and as the main contribution, a method for classification and analysis is proposed. The method is generic to environmental monitoring systems. The use of the method is also illustrated. The classification results yield even for a limited number of systems relevant clusters that help in identifying critical properties for further inspection.

History of statistics in the field of waste management in the Czech Republic is relatively long. At present the waste management survey is focused among others at the generation of waste by enterprises and municipalities, methods of waste use and disposal, and other methods of waste management.

The main objecotive of the paper is to introduce the system development and the processing methods. The paper deals not solely with the determination of the set of reporting units and its changes over years, yet also with technology of data processing, system of checks, corrections, and with a description of control relations. Following to the reduction of administrative burden on respondents and reduction of the respondent pool (from 18 thousand to 10 thousand over 5 years), methods for imputations and statistical checks are also presented. The discussion part of the paper is focused at balancing the purpose of waste management data with respective administrative burden related to their production.

The paper presents a methodology and information system for evaluating the efficiency of current municipal environmental protection expenditures. The methodology and information system were approved by the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic as a voluntary tool for municipal officials.. The proposed methodological procedure for evaluating municipal environmental protection expenditures is based on a weighted assessment of multiple criteria. The procedure gives municipalities an instrument for assessing expenditure efficiency and addresses the three pillars of sustainable development: economic development, social development, and environmental protection. The methodology and information system can be used by other countries and municipalities to evaluate the efficiency of public spending at the local level.

In Environmental Management System (EMS) area there are inherently included received decisions which entail a great risk. Reducing this risk can be achieved by using dynamic simulation models of EMS processes, such as emergency plans. The dynamic model of problem area within the EMS allows predicting sufficiently the actual results of the proposed decision and supports creativity management. This paper describes the possibilities of modelling tools Witness in modelling and simulation of the EMS processes.

Sustainable development is now often mentioned in connection with the further direction of our planet, our economy and the overall human consumption. That is the reason why the companies come with various types of innovation. The use of information technology is now an essential part of our life, our business, our marketing. This area of using computers and their information technology equipment requires a new - greener approach. This post reflects the need for sustainable computing and different approaches to its implementation to the business. We deal with the categorization of green computing performance metrics. One factor of green computing is also the customer and what he wants. Focus on customers’ requirements forced the companies to look to the markets and customers as the main drivers of their business in the area of sustainable computing. The contribution also includes the results of the research of Slovak companies approach to sustainable computing in the Slovak business environment.

Spatial planning data including urban, regional, spatial or zoning plans are not aggregated so far. Creating time series or comparative analyses on these data sets is not yet possible. The EU funded project Plan4business develops a service platform that can serve to users as a full catalogue of spatial planning data linked with other data sources such as statistics, OpenStreetMap, Urban Atlas and Corine Land Cover that are published as Open Data. The Plan4business platform will offer to clients not only the data itself in an integrated, harmonised and thus ready-to-use form, but also rich analysis and visualisation services via an API and an interactive web frontend. The users include mainly citizens, local authorities and real estate agencies. This paper introduces the problems of data integration and selected technical components of the Plan4business platform supporting data reuse and analysis.

We present an overview of the SVOD web portal (System for Visualizing of Oncological Data) which is focused on population risk analyses related to cancer epidemiology and show its integration with the FP7 project TaToo (Tagging Tool based on a Semantic Discovery Framework). The developed TaToo Tools provide a semantic web solution in order to close the discovery gap that prevents full and easy access to specific web resources. Furhter more we will discuss in detail the used ontological resources, the integration of TaToo Tools into the SVOD portal together with the evaluation of this integration.

Building construction has gone through substantial change with the emerging spread of ICT during last decades. In the field of construction industry, the term intelligent buildings describes facilities equipped with devices and systems that can be remotely controlled and programmed and that are able to communicate and collaborate in order to ensure convenient building environment and effective operation. However, installing devices with such capabilities is only one part of the task of effective facility management and risk management. Facility managers have to be provided with tools that allow them to inspect and analyze gathered building operational data and make decisions to improve building performance. Decision support tools for facility managers usually lack deep integration with building systems. This article aims on technical aspects of providing data from intelligent buildings to the responsible personnel in order to help them to operate the building effectively with emphasis on its energy consumption and risk management.

Visual analytics approaches bring an innovative and effective way how to deliver the knowledge from a particular domain to an individual user. With the use of visual analytics methods we can easily discover the unexpected relations and interesting patterns, which are hidden in the huge data warehouses. It builds on the human mind’s ability to understand the complex visualization of information. In this paper we introduce the potential usefulness of visual analytics for researchers working in the field of environmental informatics. Current challenges beyond the survey are described here, including the summary of particular well-proven tools and scenarios, which can be applied in many various fields of environmental research.

In the article we describe various methodologies considered for company performance assessment – such as Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems (SAFA) by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and other standardized reporting frameworks. We analyse and consider common characteristics of the used performance indicators. We further examine different properties of the defined key performance indicators and additional performance indicators in order to propose a data model for a generic information system. The proposed data model aims to be reusable for different performance assessment methodologies. We introduce several abstractions of the assessment methodologies on the level of performance indicators and report outputs. It is important to allow the organization to use the same data in several different reports and simplify and speed-up the reporting process. The resulting core data model of the information system is described in the article, along with a brief description of the implemented prototype system.

Within implementation of Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council 2007/06/ES of 23 October 2007 on the assessment and management of flood risks the classification was recommended to Czech Republic which sorties the areas affected by floods according to the degree of threat and economic potential of these areas. For this purpose was developed the model of territory unit evaluation. This model is formulated as a combination of two models including model of risk matrix and model of the area value expressed by available statistical data. These data reflect the different levels of areas development and their possible future development through weighted multi-criteria decision making. The aim of our paper is to present the model and its use in terms of increasing the efficiency of spending resources in area in relation to flood protection. The model may serve as an inspiration in terms of use for such a large territorial units in European countries applying the Directive.

This paper is devoted to the development of methodology and information and communication technology tools for decision support in the public sector. It analyses appropriate metrics for a municipal solid waste management expenditure (MSWE) efficiency assessment using cost-effectiveness Analysis (CEA). In addition to many other methodological issues, finding a proper output (performance, outcome) measurement is important. From the point of view of municipalities, such a measurement ought to be as clear and simple to use as possible. We analyse three possible criteria – total generated municipal solid waste, population, and municipality area – for evaluating MSWE efficiency in order to examine their appropriateness for municipal administration. The analysis covers three years, from 2009 to 2011, and municipalities from the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. We focus on a sample of 21 municipalities with specific administrative status. Expenditures were estimated using open public data from the Czech Ministry of Finance municipal accounts database. Correlation analysis showed a very strong relationship between the three chosen criteria. Public administration can certainly use all of the criteria for an efficiency assessment of MSWE to aid in decision making. However, the most suitable criterion to be population, since efficiency analysis results showed a strong correlation between population and both CEA for waste amount and CEA for municipality area. Moreover, population has a stronger relationship with MSWE than either of the other two criteria.

GeneDBase is a part of a research project titled “Creating a genetic database of selected species of mammals in the Czech Republic to be used for sustainable transport development”. The aim of the research project is to assess the impact of roads on the fragmentation of animal populations and their genetic variability. Further, the objective is to create a genetic database of mammals comprising the data from collected samples of selected wild animals which could be used widely, not only for road planning, but also in other fields (agriculture, environmental protection, land-use planning).

The

vattenwebb.smhi.se

service provides simulated as well as measured data on water flow and water quality for Sweden. The available data is used by the water authorities and decision makers in Sweden. The development of the site has been driven by the needs of the users and resulting in a site that is very appreciated by its users. An important aim in the development has been to make the data transparent for the end users, i.e. to explain the model assumptions and data quality in a way that is easy accessible. Therefore the site contains explanations about the model setup, how this data has been computed and information about the performance of the model. In this paper we will describe the service and its features with an emphasis on features used for achieving transparency.

This research presents techniques suitable for pedestrian localization in closed environments using mobile devices without the need of GPS technology. The objective of this research is to design and implement a pedestrian localization system, which can be used directly without investments into building a support infrastructure and acquiring expensive devices. The research problem is that GPS signal is weak or absent in closed spaces, thus cannot be used to identify location. Several technologies, which are using mobile sensors, are used as part of the experimental methodology to implement the system. These include tracking of wireless networks, dead reckoning, step detection, and barcode scanning. These technologies were combined and coded in the Java programming language to form the localization system. Beside the technologies mentioned above, crowdsourcing is used for gathering environment data needed for calculation of location estimates. Currently, the implementation has been done for the Android platform, but it is designed to be universal, and can be expanded to other mobile platforms. Preliminary results of the prototype application report a positioning error (standard deviation) of roughly 2 meters.

A number of past and current research and development projects aim to improve the sharing and use of environmental information. In 2010, the Environmental Infrastructures and Platforms (ENVIP) initiative was introduced as a means to identify the European potentials and specify common building blocks (‘services and enablers’) related to these projects. Work began with a set of projects supporting the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS). This paper briefly summarizes the ongoing result collection and introduces the next wave of activities, which will follow two newly emerging trends: Citizens Observatories and Linked Open Data. We invite interested parties and project consortia to provide their contributions for future analysis and synergies through the CEN/TC287 TR 15449-2 Best practices registry and the ENVIP initiative.