A Data Management and Visualization System for Coastal Zone Management
of the Mediterranean
by Catherine Houstis
The Mediterranean coastal regions have been, and continue to be,
under threat from over-exploitation, resulting in environmental degradation,
most notably visible as marine pollution. THETIS is a 30 months research
project starting in June 1998, that will establish a data management and
data visualisation system for supporting Coastal Zone Management (CZM)
for the Mediterranean Sea.
CZM is a methodology for the holistic management of all coastal resources
with the ultimate aim of promoting sustainable development of the coastal
zones. CZM recognises that pollution problems transcend political boundaries
and so to be effective CZM requires the integration of multinational data
collection, data management and data visualisation across many scientific
disciplines such as marine biology, oceanography, chemistry and engineering.
The THETIS project seeks to address the frequent requirement of scientists,
engineers and decision-makers to access, process and subsequently visualise
data collected and stored in different formats and held at different locations.
The need exists for tools that enable the integration of these data, together
with their associated data models, interpretation models, and visualisation
environments. The objective of the THETIS project is to build an advanced
integrated interoperable system for transparent access and visualisation
of data repositories, via the Internet and the Web. The system will be
a working prototype, which will demonstrate its ability to respond to users
such as scientists and local authorities that use scientific information
for decision making.
The technologies used at this project are Web tools, digital library
indexing/search service, over the Web visualisation, 2D and 3D visualisation
tools, Geographical Information Systems, Virtual Reality Modelling Language).
The expected benefits of the THETIS system for the users of the CZM
application, the citizens and the European industries are very important.
Integrated and easy access to information creates new services, thus new
job markets. Integrated data repositories access and interactive use for
CZM creates better coastal zone preservation with immediate impact to the
European citizen.
Moreover, companies will be able to use the system to sell their information
and create new integrated services for their customers. Consulting firms
can make use of the THETIS system and tools to support their business.
Finally environmental policies concerning the use of coastal resources
can be monitored via the integrated information support and easy access
of THETIS.
Figure: The components of the THETIS system architecture.
As shown in the figure, clients submit simple or complex queries via
the Web interface (Web browser) to the system. User requests invoke various
services such as metadata, index and search to locate the objects, which
match the user-query. We assume that documents are stored in DIENST servers,
and metadata services are provided to access them. The documents could
be research papers written by scientists studying the coastal properties
of the Mediterranean Sea. Images could be indexed via relational or object
oriented databases in various formats. It is possible that the information
about a region could be dispersed across several databases. This means
that the information system has to index and search across the various
databases to obtain the corresponding information. It is possible that
information could be replicated across the databases. For this service,
distributed search queries (via the Web) are sent to the various databases
to obtain the objects. Metadata services describing the GIS objects are
used to index/search for the appropriate GIS objects (multi-dimensional
data and images). Distributed search agents collect/transform the various
information objects and present the user with a composite result object.
The participants of the project are ICS-FORTH, ERCIM, INRIA, CNR, the
Institute of Marine Biology of Crete (Greece), AEROSPATIALE (France), the
IACM-FORTH (Greece), the University of Crete, HR Wallingford (United Kingdom),
and RECORMED Network (France).
Please contact:
Catherine Houstis - ICS-FORTH
Tel: +30 81 391729
E-mail: houstis@ics.forth.gr
