At a Glance
Motivation
The “Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS)” is one of three major initiatives, jointly with the INSPIRE Directive2 and the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) initiative3, taken by Europe to collect and share environmental information for the benefit of the global society.
SEIS, as a collaborative initiative of Commission’s DG ENV, Eurostat, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and the Environmental European Agency, has the following purposes related to the aims of ENVISION:
- To improve information availability and quality for a better design and implementation of Community environment policies;
- To reduce the administrative burden on Member States and EU Institutions and to modernise reporting;
- To develop information services and applications that all of us can use and benefit from.
The ENVISION project will provide an ENVIronmental Services Infrastructure with ONtologies, focusing
on supporting these initiatives.
The goals and objectives of the ENVISION project are clearly in-line with the purposes of these initiatives, which will reinforced by ENVISION. A distributed network of public information web-bases for the sharing of information and to build SEIS on existing systems in Members States are an evident element of convergence and a contribution of ENVISION to the SEIS initiative.
INSPIRE is now a legal instrument that will enable an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe, to the benefit of environmental policies. Mandatory actions to be taken by Member States to make metadata and harmonised spatial datasets available via online services will have a strong link with the field covered by ENVISION pilots and scenarios. In this view, INSPIRE is a clear challenge for the project ENVISION. The current agenda and organisation developed concerning the specification of INSPIRE data themes, a vital component of the implementing rules, is an opportunity that ENVISION has to take.
The ENVISION work on a data model for natural hazards would be a contribution to the Thematic Working Group that will specify this data theme in INSPIRE. Moreover, ENVISION team could also test this specification, if a test phase is planned by the JRC, as in Annex 1 of INSPIRE.
In addition to these clear contributions to SEIS and INSPIRE, ENVISION will also meet the challenge of the Single Information Space in Europe for the Environment (SISE), in its enablement of thematic tools and systems (service chaining, sensors) allowing a collaborative Information Space on the Web.
Doing so ENVISION will contribute to both SEIS, SISE and the INSPIRE Directive, different important initiatives taken by the European Commission to collect and share environmental information for the benefit of global society.
Challenges
The overall ENVISION challenge is to provide a web-enabled modelling infrastructure, building on the available information provided by the environmental community in the context of INSPIRE.
In enabling Web-based environmental modelling in the field of natural hazards and in building on data models and services provided by INSPIRE, ENVISION will be a major contribution to the improvement of availability and quality of natural hazard information.
Most of the existing environmental model applications are local applications based on running from static input files and providing results in form of output files or local visualisation. An important challenge is to support the migration of these models to be provided as a service, and to be able to user other services, in the context of a potential wider user community of service providers and service consumers. Some of these service interactions will go beyond simple service chaining towards service composition with service collaboration. In both of the environmental case studies in ENVISION we find examples of such local applications which we will support the migration of towards being provided as model as a service (MaaS).
The challenge to be met by ENVISION is on the web enabling and packaging of technologies for use by non ICT-skilled users in various domains, the support for migrating existing Environmental models to MaaS (Model-as-a-Service approach) on the web, and the use of data streaming information for harvesting information for dynamic building of ontologies and adapting the service execution.
The challenge of flexible discovery and chaining of distributed environmental services will be met by extending existing service infrastructures with semantic descriptions of service content and functionality. Extending means for providing data or processing as a service with the notion of MaaS, bridges the gap between environmental models and classical service infrastructures. The emphasis on semantics leverages interoperability and re-usability.
The challenge of ensuring impact in the SEIS community will be met by active use of an open-source and open-standards approach, and community web support and workshops. The impact of the project is ensured through strong partner participation and leadership in relevant standardisation communities (INSPIRE, OGC, ISO/TC211, OMG, OASIS), in user communities like SEISnet and EuroGeoSurveys and through the development of open-source software and reference implementations supporting open standards, supported by an extensive set of publications.