Orchestra: Developing a unified open architecture for risk management applications

Due to organizational and technological barriers, actors involved in the management of natural or man-made risks cannot cooperate efficiently. In an attempt to solve some of these problems, the European Commission has made "Improving risk management" one of its strategic objectives of the IST programme. The integrated project Orchestra is one of the projects that recently started in this area. The main goal of Orchestra is to design and implement an open service oriented software architecture that will improve the interoperability among actors involved in multi-risk management. In this paper we will describe the goals of Orchestra and explain some of the key characteristics of the project. These are: The chosen design process of the Orchestra Architecture. How to further improve geospatial information and standards for dealing with risks How ontologies will be used to bring interoperability from a syntactical to a semantic level. The paper ends with two examples demonstrating the benefits of the Orchestra Architecture. One is in the area of coastal zone management, and the other is related with managing earthquake risks.