Towards interoperable environmental security applications - the role of open geospatial service platform

One of the key issues for the analysis and the management of environmental security is the integration of information that is related to environmental security. There is a growing importance towards open geospatial service platforms based oil international standards in order to achieve cross-boundary interoperability. The chapter Outlines the major technological trends that have determined the design of environmental information systems as kernel components of environmental security applications in the last years following the requirements of the stakeholders. It presents ail open architecture for environmental risk management that has achieved best-practices status at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and it discusses the integration of sensor networks based oil OGC (R) standards. The chapter concludes with the discussion of ongoing research topics Such as the exploitation of semantic technologies, emerging Web service paradigms and design methodologies for service-centric computing.