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2010
Book Article
Titel
Requirements and open architecture for environmental risk management information systems
Abstract
Risk management constitutes the set of preventative, integrated actions taken to deal with risk identification, analysis, and required measures during disasters. The ability to share all relevant data, especially in disasters that cross international borders, is often very limited because environmental risk management tasks are mainly handled by public institutions on a variety of administrative levels, each with their own information technology systems for the provision of data and services. The present chapter motivates and describes a generic and open service-oriented architecture evolving from well-established standards of ISO, OGC, W3C, and OASIS. It represents the results of the European project ORCHESTRA (www.eu-orchestra.org <http://www.eu-orchestra.org>). The design principles are derived from the analysis of the triangle "user requirements," "system requirements," and "state-of-the-art technology." The resulting architecture basically follows a three-step approach. The first step focuses on the combined generic and platform-neutral specification of the conceptual service and information model. The second step is to map the abstract specification to one or more chosen service platforms (e.g., W3C Web Services). The third step comprises the engineering of service networks with a definition and enforcement of operational policies, for example, in the field of discovery and access control. The chapter concludes with a description of pilot scenarios, lessons learned from the perspective of risk and emergency managers, and an outlook about possible enhancements.