An architecture for geoprocessing-based environmental process control

Abstract

Human activity has changed natural resources in dramatic ways. In order to fight this fierce degradation, there is a great need of geographic information systems oriented to environmental monitoring. Society must track the real situation of its natural environmental resources, an action which can be accomplished by selecting important objects to be monitored, by measuring their characteristics or attributes, and by analyzing all the data using mathematical models, statistics, simulation and other tools. There is some standard, goal or desired situation for the behavior of an environmental system and, opposing this standard, the data originated from the real world must be compared. Data to be collected are of different kinds and geographically dispersed, caught by sensors disposed on specific hardware, known as Data Acquisition Systems. Thus, we present an Object-Oriented Model, based on geo-processed data, which could be considered as a framework for any kind of control information system focused on environmental processes. This model is Internet-oriented, meaning that data to be collected can be geographically distributed. After being captured, data are sent, via Internet, to specifics Data Base Management Systems (DBMS) to be stored. This raw data can be disseminated, also via Internet, to researchers or other interested individuals. Some analysis will be done with the spatial data stored in the DBMS before being presented to users. If, for various reasons, these data remain within unsafe concentration limits, some processes will be trigged in order to avoid environmental damages to air, soil or water. With this framework, models could also be developed for different kinds of ecosystems and archived in a specific database aiming at being reused later. A Java based prototype was developed to show the model functionalities.