Gerald Schimak

• Dipl.-Ing.
• Austrian Institute of Technology

Climate change and other factors like roll back of living environment of species make outbreak of pandemics more likely. To respond adequately to threats arising from pathogens like emerging arboviruses such as the Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus or the West Nile virus, mobile one health laboratories with the highest bio-safety level 4 (BSL4...

Within this paper requirements and related gaps associated with cross-border pandemic management are analyzed. In order to systematically investigate the potential of solutions to close such gaps, trials can be executed and evaluated. Core elements of such trials are specific scenarios that frame the validation of the applicability of solutions. St...

Pandemien stellen eine enorme Herausforderung in vielen Bereichen des täglichen Lebens dar. Ein entscheidender Erfolgsfaktor in der Prävention und Bewältigung von Pandemien ist die Bereitstellung relevanter Informationen für Akteure im Pandemiemanagement. In der vorliegenden Arbeit stellen wir eine Methode vor, die die Identifizierung von Lösungen...

Currently we all are facing a challenging time around the globe regarding pandemics, natural as well as manmade disasters. First to mention the current Covid-19 situation in Europe but also worldwide, which forces ministers, politicians, responsible from health and environmental organisation on regional, national level, first responders and many mo...

Evaluations in the frame of the EU research projects DRIVER+ and STAMINA revealed that, aside from the multitude of solutions that can be applied to manage a pandemic (restraining measures, protective equipment, tests for epidemiological observations, therapies and vaccines, tools for predictions, resource planning and monitoring, IT solutions for...

Crisis Management (CM) is a challenging area when it comes to connecting solutions aiming to support the various tasks involved in handling of CM situations. DRIVER+ [1] an EU-funded project launched in 2014 was setting up a technical infrastructure (so called Test-bed) that allows to interconnect solutions, so they can interact and exchange all cr...

The CLARITY project (www.clarity-h2020.eu) aims to implement a new generation of climate services that allow the service users to perform an initial assessment of the expected climate change effects in the project area, as well as an initial assessment of the need for and of the usability of the adaptation options in the early project planning phas...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 13th IFIP WG 5.11 International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, ISESS 2020, held in Wageningen, The Netherlands, in February 2020. The 22 full papers and 3 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 29 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics on environmental...

Tools for decision making with in a proper collaboration environment are of utmost importance for crises managers as well as decision makers to get continuous and accurate information about the crises situation. One of the main tools in C2-SENSE project is called Emergency Maps Tool (EMT). It has been developed as part of a broader collaboration en...

Different organizations with their Command & Control (C2) and Sensing Systems have to cooperate and constantly exchange and share data and information in order to manage emergencies, crises and disasters. Although individual standards and specifications are usually adopted in C2 and Sensing Systems separately, there is no common, unified interopera...

Interoperability is a core component in management of crises and disasters. Crises require interoperability on several different levels: physical (communication, devices and tools), operational (crisis response procedures and protocols) and document level (information exchange). Here we present the Framework that facilitates interoperability on a l...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th IFIP WG 5.11 International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, ISESS 2017, held in Zadar, Croatia, in May 2017. The 35 revised full papers presented together with 4 keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The papers deal with environmental chall...

Erratum to: R. Denzer et al. (Eds.) Environmental Software Systems DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35503-0

A proper collaboration environment is of utmost importance for crises managers as well as decision makers to get continuous and accurate information about the crises situation and to manage the available resources on the fly. Interoperability of existing systems, tools, methods and standardized processes are needed to allow effective management of...

The Emergency Maps Tool (EMT) has been developed as part of a collaboration environment in the C2-SENSE Emergency Interoperability Framework (www.c2-sense.eu). The collaboration environment aims to connect all relevant organizations for joint response in emergency and crises situations. The Emergency Maps Tool aims to display all relevant resources...

With the rise of social media platforms, crowdsourcing became a powerful tool for mobilizing the public. Events such as the earthquake in Haiti or the downfall of governments in Libya and Egypt indicate its potential in crisis situations. In the scope of this paper, we discuss the relevance of crowdsourcing in the area of crisis and disaster manage...

Migration is a major challenge for the European Union, resulting in early preparedness being an imperative for target states and their stakeholders such as border police forces. This preparedness is necessary for multiple reasons, including the provision of adequate search and rescue measures. To support preparedness, there is a need for early indi...

This paper describes the requirements engineering methodology used for the definition of semantic sensors in a Crisis and Disaster Management framework. The goal of the framework is effective management of emergencies which depends on timely information availability, reliability and intelligibility. To achieve this, different Command and Control (C...

Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (ISESS 2015), held in March 2015 at the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne, Australia. Book, eBook and individual articles are available at Springer Link.

Preface of the ISESS 2015 Conference Proceedings. Available at Springer Link.

Proceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (ISESS 2015), held in Melbourne, Australia in March 2015. Available from Springer Link.

Preface of Environmental Software Systems - Infrastructures, Services and Applications. Book and individual articles available at Springer Link.

The stellar growth of the smartphones and nearly gapless mobile network coverage in urban and suburban areas has widely extended the potential of the citizens' observatories. The possibility to easily record observations made by mobile citizens, and to automatically enrich this information using the built-in and external sensors sounds like a dream...

The objective of this study is to develop a traffic noise model under diverse traffic conditions in metropolitan cities. The model has been developed to calculate equivalent traffic noise based on four input variables i.e. equivalent traffic flow (Q e ), equivalent vehicle speed (S e ) and distance (d) and honking (h). The traffic data is collected...

Major parts of the Book are addressing topics like: -Environmental Application in the scope of the Future Internet -Smart and mobile devices used for Environmental Applications -Information Tools for Global Environmental Assessment -Environmental Applications in Risk & Crises Management -EIS as a part of the 7th Environment Action Programme of EU...

TaToo – Tagging tool based on a semantic discovery framework, a project funded by the European Commission provides a web-based solution for easy and accurate discovery as well as tagging of environmental resources. The novelty relies on a semantic framework integrating different domain ontologies in a multi-domain and multilingual context. The unde...

Based on governmental institutions and strong volunteer organizations, Austria provides a comprehensive and well developed emergency response system. As an important factor for the maintenance of the current quality standard of Austria’s protection and emergency system, the further engagement of voluntariness has to be ensured and enhanced in the l...

Internet has allowed the exponential growing of the information available in all knowledge domains. This information is published in a non-coordinated way using different standards and formats. Traditional search engines solve with relative success the needs of most Internet users searching for general purpose information. However, specific users l...

The attached full text contains the preface and TOC of the book. Articles are available from Springer. This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 5.11 International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, ISESS 2011, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in June 2011. The 68 revised full papers presented together with four invi...

The vision of a Single Information Space in Europe for the Environment (SISE) requires seamless access to environmental resources, including data, models and services. Standardization organizations like OGC and OASIS have laid the foundations for interoperability on a syntactic level for many aspects of distributed environmental information systems...

The TaToo consortium has recently developed a set of services and web applications allowing distributed semantic annotation of third party environmental resources. Central concept of the TaToo project is a set of self-contained “TaToos” that are used as a base for semantically enhanced resources discovery and retrieval by the TaToo’s discovery serv...

Difficult to find, difficult to understand! Can we trust this information? How reliable are these data? Would these data or model serve my needs? Uncountable questions are now being raised by numerous end users, after the result of their search query returned some (or tons) of information on the web. TaToo tries to improve the success rate for reli...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 5.11 International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, ISESS 2011, held in Brno, Czech Republic, in June 2011. The 68 revised full papers presented together with four invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in th...

The Internet is growing in a non-coordinated manner, where different groups continuously publish and update information, adopting a variety of standards, according to the specific domain of interest: from agriculture to ecology, from groundwater to climate change. This unconstrained and unregulated growth has proven to be very successful, as more i...

Sensors and sensor networks are an important component in the monitoring and management of environmental systems. In this editorial we outline the main features of the Thematic Issue titled “Sensors and the Environment – Modelling & ICT challenges” which contains eight papers focusing on different aspects of research and development of sensors for...

Ten years after the Murrays' announcement, the sensors are indeed inexpensive and ubiquitous. Nevertheless, the vision of "electronic skin" is still a remote dream. Indeed, an operational world-wide Sensor Web is more than just a sum of its parts: all information has to be available in easily discoverable, retrievable, and understandable form. In r...

The web is rapidly evolving and its traditional role of repository of static information is changing into a hub for collaboration among people. Web resources tend to become more and more complex, and to offer services that include access to remote databases, and computational power. All of this becomes very interesting not only for the common user,...

This paper summarizes the methodology and concept used to design the air quality monitoring network in Bucharest City carried out during 2002 and 2003 in the framework of the EU PHARE Project "Local Pilot Investment Project in the EPA (Environment Protection Agency)-Bucharest for Air Quality Monitoring". Although, similar methodologies were widely...

The Sensor Service Architecture (SensorSA) developed by the Sensors Anywhere (SANY) Integrated Project demonstrates the feasibility of building full-fledged Environmental Information Systems without proprietary protocols. In a quest for maximal interoperability, the SensorSA embraces the sensor- specific service interfaces, data encodings and XML s...

The SANY IP consortium (http://www.sany-ip.eu) has recently developed several interesting service prototypes that extend the usability of the Open Geospatial Consortium “Sensor Web Enablement” (OGC SWE) architecture. One such service prototype, developed by the Austrian Research Centers, is the “cascading SOS” (SOS-X). SOS-X is a client to the unde...

Information sharing across borders, environmental domains and organisations is one of the strategic goals of the European Commission within Framework Programme 6 and 7. It includes the vision of building a Single Information Space for the Environment in Europe (SISE). This is a challenging task for research and industry as well as for policy. One o...

The SANY-IP (http://sany-ip.eu) recently demonstrated the feasibility of building open standard based Environmental Monitoring Systems and decision support applications. The resulting "Sensor Service Architecture v1" specification is available on SANY-IP web site. As part of this activity, Austrian Research Centres (ARC) developed a first prototype...

The increasing frequency, severity and consequences in Europe of floods, storms, forest fires and other natural hazards sensitive to climate change has clearly shown the shortcomings of existing environmental monitoring and information systems. The observed inefficiency is primarily a consequence of historical and organizational factors. An exorbit...

The Austrian Research Centers (ARCS) recently developed a first prototype of the "SensorSA data acquisition system" (SensorSA DAS). This network capable appliance allows seamless integration of various sensors in Sensor Service Architecture (SensorSA) compliant network. In 2009, SensorSA DAS will be used to test and demonstrate "plug and measure" a...

Significant unregulated development is occurring in sensor devices, protocols and sensor networks especially in the areas of air and water quality monitoring and management where the focus has been on human health and exposure impacts. Satellite technology is well established as a means of deploying sensors. However, for monitoring of air and water...

Austrian Research Centres (ARC) participates in development of the IT-infrastructure, architecture and services capable of addressing this challenge in the context of risk management through ORCHESTRA IP (http://www.eu-orchestra.org/), and in the context of environmental monitoring networks through SANY IP (http://sany-ip.eu/). In order to minimiz...

Significant uncoordinated development in the areas of sensor devices, protocols and networks is occurring in the areas of air and water quality monitoring and management, with a focus also on impacts on health and human exposure. It is well accepted that monitoring of our planet is done by sensors put into orbit. However, for surface monitoring we...

Sensors provide some of the basic input data for risk management of natural and man-made hazards. Here the word ‘sensors’ covers everything from remote sensing satellites, providing invaluable images of large regions, through instruments installed on the Earth's surface to instruments situated in deep boreholes and on the sea floor, providing highl...

Handling of meta-information is a challenging task in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. Not only the when and where meta-information shall be used is a problem even the pure trial to define what meta- information is or is meant by, can become a never ending story. The ORCHESTRA project, an integrated EU project (http://www.eu-orche...

Public authorities in charge of the environmental monitoring are confronted with an increasing number and severeness of the natural- and human-caused disasters, budgetary constrains and heavy pressure to allow re-use of all environmental information gathered using taxpayers money at a reasonable cost (preferably free of charge) by all interested pa...

Handling of meta-information is a challenging task in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. Not only the when and where meta-information shall be used is a problem even the pure trial to define what meta- information is or is meant by, can become a never ending story. The ORCHESTRA project, an integrated EU project (http://www.eu-orche...

Sensors Anywhere (SANY) is an FP6 IST-5 Integrated Project dealing with sensor networks research for environmental applications. It aims to contribute to joint European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) “Global Monitoring for Environment and Security” (GMES) initiative by improving the interoperability of insitu sensors and sensor...

Rising awareness of the importance and vulnerability of the environment within the EU have led to several water related directives that culminated in the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) on 23 October 2000 [1]. Politically a revolution, the WFD has so far mainly concentrated on legislative issues and unified reporting, but leaving the question of...

Atmospheric emission inventories are important tools for environmental decision making. The need to include transparency and reproducibility in emission calculation also fostered the development of environmental software systems for emission inventories. In general such software systems are organized as databases which contain as much emission rela...

This paper describes an envisioning system (EvS) designed to help rural communities contemplate landscape level changes. Simulations and models project current conditions into the future according to the constraints of scenario-based planning and available ...

Organisatorische sowie technologische Barrieren verhindern heutzutage noch immer die Zusammenarbeit von Behörden und Verantwortlichen im Bereich Risikomanagement. Vielerorts fehlen ad-hoc Zugangs- bzw. Zugriffsmöglichkeiten zu wichtigen und vor allem qualitätsgesicherten Informationen. Besonders problematisch wird es, wenn versucht wird Information...

This paper presents an overview of the ORCHESTRA project and relates ORCHESTRA to general research issues in the area of systems integration. ORCHESTRA responds to European needs to develop a standardised, general purpose and generic information infrastructure for the management of environmental and risk management information and related cross-bou...

UWEDAT stands for a new environmental data management and monitoring system based on Windows NT/2000. It is mainly used in the field of ambient air quality monitoring. The kernel of the system is designed and implemented in a modular and flexible way, thus it is possible to customize this information system in a variety of ways.UWEDAT does not only...

In this paper we will present a prototype of a soft real-time database system called Data Point Processor (DPP) and how it can be used in an environmental monitoring system. The aim of this system is the preprocessing of data which is delivered by the measurement instruments. The recent development of environmental software systems showed that it i...

To get quick and reliable information about the current load of pollutants caused by different kind of sources, like point (industry), line (traffic) or area (agriculture) emission inventories are an adequate tool. The below discussed system will show an emission inventory system installed for the federal province Upper Austria which integrates dat...

Environmental Informatics (or Enviromatics) is a maturing subject with interdisciplinary roots in computer science, environmental planning, ecology, economics and other related areas. Its practitioners must be prepared to work with many diverse professional groups. It forms the foundation for computer-assisted environmental protection. This book co...

TEMSIS-Transnational Environmental Management Support and Information System, is intended to be a tool for transnational cooperation between the communities in the German-French urban agglomeration, Moselle-Est/Stadtverband Saarbrucken. Its main objective is to integrate existing information platforms of local environmental authorities in Germany a...

Environmental Informatics is a fast growing field which deals with all methods from computer science, environmental planning, ecology and related subjects. As well as being an interdisciplinary area, Environmental Informatics provides an interface between all involved professional groups. Monitoring the state of the environment, analysing existing...

The Austrian ozone-monitoring network was set up as a result of the Austrian Ozone Law, which became effective in 1992, as well as to fulfill the 'Austrian Federal Act Concerning Access to Information on the Environment' (Environmental Information Act). This paper extracts highlights of the relevant laws and provides a detailed description of the i...

In this paper we will present a prototype of a soft real-time database system called Data Point Processor (DPP) and how it can be used in an environmental monitoring system. The aim of this system is the preprocessing of data which is delivered by the measurement instruments. The recent development of environmental software systems showed that it i...

TEMSIS - Transnational Environmental Management Support and Information System is intended to be a tool for transnational cooperation between the communities in the German-French urban agglomeration, Moselle-Est / Stadtverband Saarbrücken. Its main aspect is to integrate existing information platforms of local environmental authorities, and to exch...

Edited proceedings of the first International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, held at PennState, Malvern, USA, 1995. The full text includes the TOC, ´book and articles are available from Springer.

After the installation of the Austrian Ozone Monitoring Network in April 1994, it was soon clear that the information gathered all over the country should be provided to all interested in that matter. For that task an acceptable technology was found by using World Wide Web. To demonstrate how this new technology can be used to access actual environ...

Due to increasing practical needs, software support of environmental protection and research tasks is growing in importance and scope. Software systems help to monitor basic data, to maintain and process relevant environmental information, to analyze gathered information and to carry out decision processes, which often have to take into account com...

The paper will describe in a more general way the purpose of environmental information systems and its practice. To show how difficult integration of different environmental data, for example of different monitoring systems is we will specify an integration approach for such systems and demonstrate a concept how integration can be done.

The paper gives a detailed description of the integration problems arising if you must combine a number of different distributed environmental information systems. We show the practical solutions obtained in the Austrian Ozone Network project.

The paper will describe first, in a more general way the tasks of air pollution monitoring systems developed and implemented by the Austrian Research Center Seibersdorf in the last three years. This part will include a general technical overview of concepts of the air pollution monitoring system UWEDAT. The second part of the paper will introduce t...

In this paper the integration problem in large distributed environmental information systems is discussed. We present a project dealing with the definition of a framework for such systems and show the difficulties herewith using a practical example.

Die Reihe von Workshops mit dem Titel 'Visualisierung von Umweltdaten" hat sich in den zu einem wichtigen Diskussions- und Arbeitsforum fOr das Gebiet letzten drei Jahren graphisch-interaktiver Anwendungen im Umweltschutz entwickelt. Hiermit erganzt der Work­ shop die gror1en Jahrestagungen zum Thema "Informatik im Umweltschutz". Die dritte Veranst...

Summary of 3rd Workshop Visualisation of Environmental Data

Für die Betreiber von Luftmeßnetzen ist es unumgänglich notwendig, die anfallenden Daten zu sichten (Grenzwertüberschreitungen, Vorwarnstufen, Alarmierung, etc.), zu kontrollieren (um Systemveränderungen festzustellen) und zu bewerten (d.h. festlegen, ob die Daten auch gültig sind). Bislang war es üblich, die Daten (Halbstunden-Mittelwerte) auf ein...

A basic task of environmental protection is the monitoring of the current environmental state. Although wishablefor most of the environmental parameters, it is not possible to make the monitoring process continually for everything. From the three basic media: air, water and ground, only for the air has continually monitoring widely been achieved wi...

Angesichts der vieler Orts entstehenden, interdisziplinär angelegten Umweltinformationssysteme ist es an der Zeit, sich Gedanken darüber zu machen, welche Inhalte, Aufgaben und Strukturen diesen Informationssystemen generell, sowie auch im speziellen innewohnen. Die fundamentalen Gesichtspunkte bei der Entwicklung solcher Systeme sind Abstimmung un...