Spatio-Temporal Data Management and Processing in the Context of
Civil Protection Scenarios
Raffaele De Amicis, Giuseppe Conti, Federico Prandi
Fondazione Graphitech, Trento, Italy
Abstract
Management of the environment as well as related risks requires the development of
complex simulations and analysis capabilities which stand well beyond features
currently available from most SDIs. Moreover, the time-varying nature of the data being
handled, such as real-time information from sensors, historical series of areal and
satellite imaging or vector data, requires re-considering the way planners, decision
makers and emergency operators access and manage spatio-temporal geographic
information. Civil protection operators, emergency teams and public administrations
officers who are engaged in urban planning, resource and environmental management,
risk mitigation and prediction, all need spatio-temporal processing capabilities based on
available Geographical Information (GI) in order to better support decision-making
during planning, training and response to critical events.
Nevertheless current SDIs as well as the ESDI, only partially address the
aforementioned user needs since they offer no or very limited time variable
management1. Furthermore the integration between INSPIRE-compliant geographic
datasets and operational databases, which is essential in domains such as environmental
risk management and civil protection, is actually very poor. In fact, at present, the scope
of services beyond discover, view and download services, offered by current SDIs is
extremely limited. With very few exceptions, current guidelines as well as national and
international standards, do not provide extensive support for time dimension, neither do
ongoing projects funded by EC programmes, such as eContentPlus, or initiatives such as
GMES.
BRISEIDE - BRIdging SErvices, Information and Data for Europe is a Pilot B, funded
by the ICT Policy Support Programme (or ICT PSP), tries to bridge the aforementioned
gap, by building on top of existing SDIs in order to provide users with more complete
and adequate data and processing tools capable to handle the time dimension.
BRISEIDE will explicitly focus on INSPIRE. In fact, although INSPIRE data models
and IRs are proposing to attach lifecycle information to relevant feature types, the
solution envisaged so far is not adequate to cover a number of critical issues. A recent a
study commissioned by JRC2, which has investigated the adoption of temporal
information in the context of resources of relevance to the INSPIRE directive, has
underlined that there is a clear need for extended description of temporal information.
The study has also defined a list of recommendations to benefit from temporal
information available within geospatial data, in the context of INSPIRE metadata
implementing rules. As highlighted by the document, almost all themes have specific
requirements in terms of temporal data, particularly those within annex III, of particular
interest for BRISEIDE, where most data have an explicit temporal dimension.
1
Refer to: Dekkers M. (2008). Report published on Temporal Metadata for Discovery: A review of current practice.
In Craglia M. (Ed) EUR – Scientific and Technical Research series – ISSN 1018-5593.
2
Ibid.
Furthermore a report from the EC3 on the status of INSPIRE implementing rules has set,
as priority for the Drafting Team, the need “to express different temporal dimensions of
data in different thematic communities” clearly acknowledging that “different thematic
communities have different ways to express the temporal dimensions of their datasets
[…] It is appropriate that such matters are considered by the working groups that will
address the interoperability of spatial datasets and services for the relevant themes in
Annexes II and III”.
More specifically, in current IRs, only four temporal elements are considered. These are
within the metadata element “temporal reference” which includes the following subelements:
1. The temporal extent of the resource (the time period covered by the resource).
2. The resource’s date of creation.
3. The resource’s date of publication.
4. The resource’s date of last revision
This information is complemented by an additional piece of information related to
element metadata date which defines the date when the metadata was created or
updated.
However this information is related to the resource’s lifecycle with no direct reference
on temporal information on the real phenomenon, with only element “temporal extent”
being partially related to information on the real resource. In fact, although it is possible
to describe the event within the “resource abstract”, with the current model it is not
possible to provide a temporal characterization of the phenomenon. For instance, in the
case of different satellite imagery showing forest fires, the present models allow
defining the time when the image showing the fire was taken but not the actual time at
the fire took place. It is evident that this piece of information is extremely important to
be able to retrieve information on the evolution of the fire at different time intervals.
For this reason BRISEIDE proposes to extend current data/metadata models to be able
to benefit from information available at high refresh rate (e.g. from sensors) as well as
to be able to analyze evolution of phenomena over time.
To do so BRISEIDE will:
1. Deliver time-aware extensions of data models developed in the context of
previous/ongoing INSPIRE-related projects, including, but not limited to, a
number of eContentPlus projects such as NatureSDIPlus, EURADIN, etc.
2. Develop a number of value added services for spatio-temporal data management,
authoring, processing, analysis and interactive visualisation.
3. Deploy a number of 3D web-based pilot applications based on the integration of
existing, user operational information.
The pilots B will be deployed, tested and validated within a number of different
scenarios, across several EU countries related to Civil Protection application context, by
building on top of relevant INSPIRE themes, via a chain of stakeholders, data providers,
technology partners, and downstream users.
The operational phase of BRISEIDE will last twelve months and will consider real life
events, with extensions in additional domains, being considered and assessed. Since
BRISEIDE applications and validation will focus on the INSPIRE Directive the services
developed will use existing pan-European datasets made available by Public
3
European Commission (2008). INSPIRE metadata implementing rules: summary of process. Date of last
revision: 2008-04-28
Administrations, including Regional governments and public administration
departments as well as those datasets available through a number of INSPIRE-related
EU projects through specific which have formally signed a Memorandum of
Understanding with the project. This way the different pilots will provide coverage of
the vast majority of EU countries.
However BRISEIDE services will not be not strictly dependant on a specific dataset and
therefore it will be possible to deploy or extend them to other application domains.
From a technical standpoint, BRISEIDE develops spatial analysis through Web
Processing Services (WPS) and integrates them within existing open source WPS
framework such as Sextante by 52°North and PyWPS by HS-RS. Spatio-temporal
processing services will be exposed via the web and made available through compatible
WebGIS applications.
BRISEIDE will also take advantage from newly developed as well as prototypical
OWSs already made available by relevant INSPIRE-related EU projects that expose
standard services such as WMS, WCS and WFS. These will be used to provide access
to relevant geodatabases, enriched, when needed, with information, extracted from
heterogeneous, distributed user operational databases.
At the client level BRISEIDE services will be accessible through a multi-platform 3D
client, invoked from a webpage as a Java WebStart application. The 3D client allows
interactive orchestration of spatio-temporal WPSs providing support to chaining of
required processing units. This ensures interactive access to datasets and asynchronous
processing at the server side.
In a typical scenario an operator logs onto a webpage and activates a 3D web-based
client. A number of spatio-temporal processing services exposed by distributed servers
are made available through its graphical user interface in a very interactive and user
friendly manner. The functionalities available as WPS (Web Processing Service) allow
application oriented (e.g. Civil Protection) processing, navigation and query of time
series. The user drags and drops processing units within the 3D environment and
connects them, thus creating complex compound spatio-temporal chains. The system
then automatically orchestrates the different processes involved and it invokes them in
the proper order. The results of the analysis are interactively shown on the screen.
All BRISEIDE processing services will be available through other OGC-compliant
webGIS applications (e.g., GvSIG). Most relevantly the spatio-temporal services of
BRISEIDE will be available as open source.