Fostering the vision of information sharing in Europe

DI Gerald Schimak, DI Ecker Severin, Information Management, ARCSgerald.schimak; ecker.severin@arcs.ac.at

EnviroInfo 2008, Lüneburg, Germany10. September 2008

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DI Gerald Schimak

Overview

SEIS’s challenging tasks and requirements

Technical Approach to a shared information space (Re-use ORCHESTRA)

Benefits

Conclusion

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SEIS’s challenging tasks and requirements

Collect data once; Use and share them many times. Modernisation and simplification of the collection, exchange and use of data and

information for the design and implementation of environmental policy

Manage the data at their source level. Replacement of centralised systems for reporting by systems based on access,

sharing and interoperability

Provide accessibility and availability of data (to public authorities) at any time and at all levels, from local to European, to facilitate reporting obligations as well as to inform citizens about the state of the environment. Improve the quality and availably of information required for environmental policy Keep administrative burdens to a minimum

Make information available in relevant national languages Re-use investments (at regional, national, EU)

Source: SEC 2008

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SEIS’s Technical Approach – Current and Future

Source: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/seis/index.htm

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Sensors

Maps

Documents

Archive

Control centre

Catalog(s)Knowledge Base(s)

ORCHESTRA’s Ambition

Thematic data

Spatial data

Meta-information

AnalysisInfo Centre

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DI Gerald Schimak

ORCHESTRA in a nutshell

ORCHESTRA objectives

To design and implement an open service-oriented architecture (SOA) (e.g. for risk management) in Europe

To develop a set of services that are useful for various environmental (e.g. risk management) applications

To validate the results (i.e. architecture and services) in multi-risk scenarios (pilots)

To improve accessibility and availability of data (e.g.: cross-border) To enable interoperability between systems by a standards-based IT

architecture To overcome the lack of a common risk management terminology, the

diversity of procedures, policies and business models (with the use of semantics).

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DI Gerald Schimak

Problem statement of a Civil Protection or Environmental Agency

Source: http://iapf.physik.tu-berlin.de/DZ/dickow/Pyrenaeen/Karte.html

How big is the risk of a forest fire in a certain region of the Pyreneesin a given season ?

Temporal ref.: Time series and

prognostics

Spatial ref.: cross-border, cross-

administration

Thematic ref.:Forest Fire – Vegetation – Geology – Cartography –

Meteorology – Settlements – Industry –

Traffic - ...

Conceptual ref.:What is a risk ?

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Conceptual & Implementation Architecture

Abstract(= platform-neutral)

Concrete(= platform-specific)

Implementation specs

Implementation components

Conceptual models

Abstract specs:

• Services

• Information models

• Interaction patterns

ORCHESTRA Implementation Architecture

ORCHESTRA (Conceptual)Architecture op

en

gene

ric

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DI Gerald Schimak

Service Capabilities Interface Feature Access Service Map and Diagram Service Schema Mapping Service Coordinate Operation Service Service Chain Access Service Processing Service

Major ORCHESTRA Services/Interfaces

User Management Service Authorisation Service Authentication Service

Service MonitoringService

resources

Acces

s Control

Mon

itorin

gSearchSe

ma

ntic

s

Catalogue Service

Ontology Access Service Inferencing Service Annotation Service

Sensor Access Service

Sensor Observation Service

Sensor Alert Service

Sensor Planning Service

Web Notification Service

WS-Addressing

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Meta-information – establishing Interoperability

Service capabilities

Service capabilities comprise a set of meta-information of a service which can be delivered to a service user as a self-description of the service.

They can be specified by means of an ORCHESTRA Application Schema for Meta-Information (OAS-MI), which can be published in a catalogue and used by clients to discover a service.

Furthermore, it contains all necessary information enabling a client to invoke operations provided by a service.

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DI Gerald Schimak

Meta-information - Service Capabilitiescd OAS-MI-Serv ice Capabilities

OA_SchemaEntry

«Type»OA-MI Types::

OA_MI_Serv ice_SpecificCapabilities

OA_MI_Property

«Type»OA-MI Types::

OA_MI_Serv ice_Capabilities

OA_SchemaEntry

«Type»OA-MI Types::OA_MI_Serv ice_CommonCapabilities

+ avai lableSections: CharacterString [1..n]+ serviceDescription: Local isedCharacterString [0..1]+ serviceName: CharacterString+ serviceSpecVersion: CharacterString+ serviceType: OA_ServiceType [1..n]+ serviceDocumentation: OA_URI

0..1

1

0..1

1

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ORCHESTRA catalogue service

Ability to publish, query and retrieve descriptive information (meta-information) for resources (i.e. data and services) of any type. Specific characteristics are described in (Hilbring and Usländer, 2006), such as: not tied to a particular schema of a meta-information standard (e.g. ISO

19115) supports application schemas for meta-information designed according

to the ORCHESTRA rules may be used as a data catalogue or a service registry may be cascaded with OGC catalogues or OASIS UDDI includes an adapter to Internet search engines (e.g. Yahoo) includes an extension for ontology-based query expansion and result

ranking

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ORCHESTRA Service Networks (Pilots)

Typsa Pilot Floods and forest fire risk

assessment in Tordera basin/Spain

BRGM Pilot Risk assessment for roads in the

French-Italian border region

JRC Pilot Pan-European assessment of

natural hazards

BMT Pilot Environmental risks caused by ship traffic in the German Bight

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InterfaceORCHESTRA Catalogue Service

ISO ISO ISOebRIM

Semantic Query

Expansion

SemanticRanking

Option: Semantic Catalogue

Typsa Pilot OGC Catalogue

BRGM Pilot OGC Catalogue

JRC Pilot OGC Catalogue

BMT Pilot OGC Catalogue

Yahoo API

SOAP Web Service

cascading

ORCHESTRA Catalogue Client

Meta-information

profiles

Federated Pilot – Architecture

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Benefits

End users Flexible and semantically enhanced search of information Access to all available information Same understanding (through defined glossaries and ontologies)

Software Developers It provides a uniform conceptual model of both the information and the service

viewpoint and Tackles the problem of both syntactic and semantic interoperability. It is specified both on a platform-neutral level and on a platform-specific level.

Investors Exploit existing investment and experience for your application; enable re-use for

other applications Accelerate developments; reduce development and maintenance costs

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Conclusion

SEIS tries to solve numerous problems on various administrative levels in the European Union by defining a new infrastructure with the goal of reducing the number of copies of the same information to a minimum for improved manageability, and maximizing its sharing and accessibility throughout the public authorities and the citizens.

ORCHESTRA worked successfully for about three years to develop a service oriented architecture (including the specification and implementation of services) for an infrastructure as well as to provide a reference model for interoperability and accessibility of data and services cross boundaries. Certainly ORCHESTRA does not provide an out-of-the-box solution for all

SEIS problems and requirements but it can easily be adapted. It is also noteworthy that the ORCHESTRA architecture is open, which

means that every institution and organization can adopt it free of charge. Most of the services will be licensed under open source. Thus, “SEIS ready” seems to be a good attribute for ORCHESTRA!

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ORCHESTRA – Book

Subscribe the SANY newsletter – to be informed and updated about the project progress, SANY events (up to the end of 2009) & SANY results

SANY Project: www.sany-ip.eu

To read more about the value proposition, underlying concepts and technology, advantage of standards, building ORCHESTRA service networks and –applications.

» a MUST have!

www.eu-orchestra.org

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DI Gerald Schimak

ORCHESTRA facts

Project start: September 2004 Finished: 29. February 2008 Budget: 13.75 M€ (funding 8.2 M€) Contract type: Integrated Project