GeoSol: Decision Support in Monitoring Water Quality and Crisis Management

Along with starvation, sickness and war, pollution is considered as a problem of the twentieth century. Besides the toxic substances and the phenols, other extremely dangerous contaminators e.g. detergents, pesticides, hydrocarbons, oil products and radioactive wastes affect the quality of drinking water.Monitoring and control of the pollution of the surface water courses allows the supervision of the natural processes of dilution and self-purification, and also to take appropriate purification actions for re-establishing the equilibrium between self-purification and pollution processes. Continuous evaluation of the environmental monitoring data and support of the human operator in emergency situations are the main objectives of computer-based Decision Support Tools.This paper presents the advanced decision support tool GeoSol (Geographical Solution) together with its experimental application in monitoring water quality of the Rhine river in Germany, and its benefits in solving environmental crisis situations. Running on PC (Personal Computer, MS-Windows, INFORMIX database facilities) and with access to GIS (Geographical Information System) it allows the continuous interpretation of water analysis data in the temporal and spatial domains. The technical solution of the GeoSol prototype adopted the principles of the client-server architecture, based on the requirements generated within two European projects developed by Siemens Nixdorf and its project partners, ESPRIT 7522/6339 GeoWorks and ENS project E2008 ENVIRONET.