Ralf Denzer

• Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Dipl. Ing.
• Professor at Independent Researcher

ENVIRONMENTAL SOFTWARE SYSTEMS, Volume 6, Environmental Risk Assessment Systems, SECOND EDITION. This volume contains a newly compiled version of the Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems 2005 (ISESS 2005), published by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) under ISBN 3-901882-21-...

Environmental software systems (ESS) are software systems supporting activities of environmental protection, environmental management, environmental policy and environmental sciences. ESS often overlap with adjacent application fields like security, agriculture, health or climate change. The ISESS conference series is one of several overlapping eve...

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.

This volume contains a newly compiled version of the Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems 2009 (ISESS 2009), published by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). The original version was a USB with individual PDF articles linked together. This SECOND EDITION contains the complete p...

This volume contains a newly compiled version of the Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems 2007 (ISESS 2007), published by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) under ISBN 978-3-901882-22-7. The original version was a USB with individual PDF articles linked together. This SECOND ED...

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

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

Environmental software systems (ESS) are software systems supporting activities of environmental protection, environmental management, environmental policy and environmental sciences. ESS often overlap with adjacent application fields like security, agriculture, health or climate change. The ISESS conference series is one of several overlapping eve...

Sharing of open government data is amongst other reasons hindered by incompatibility of data models in different data collections. Only a few areas in the envi-ronmental domain have progressed towards commonly used data models. The purpose of this paper is to share with the community a data model which is used in a spatial information platform bein...

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.

Sharing of open government data is amongst other reasons hindered by incompatibility of data models in different data collections. Only a few areas in the environmental domain have progressed towards commonly used data models. The purpose of this paper is to share with the community a data model which is used in a spatial information platform being...

In the context of the CRISMA FP7 project we have developed a seamless decision support concept to connect simulated crisis scenarios and aggregated performance indicators of impact scenarios with state of the art Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods. To prove the practicality of the approach we have developed a decision support tool real...

This paper reports about a software package which has been developed to automatically partition hydrological networks (catchments) into clusters of similar size. Such clustering is useful for parallel simulation of catchments on distributed computing systems and is typically based on heuristic graph algorithms. There have been a few approaches to a...

In the context of the CRISMA FP7 project we have developed a seamless decision support concept to connect simulated crisis scenarios and aggregated performance indicators of impact scenarios with state of the art Multi- Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods. To prove the practicality of the approach we have developed a decision support tool rea...

This volume contains a newly compiled version of the Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems 2001 (ISESS 2001), published by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) under ISBN 3-901882-14-6. The original version was a printed softcover book. This SECOND EDITION contains the scanned and...

This volume contains a newly compiled version of the Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems 2003 (ISESS 2003), published by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) under ISBN 3-901882-16-2. The original version was a printed softcover book. This SECOND EDITION contains the scanned and...

Japanese translation of original book article: Th. Usländer, R. Denzer, Requirements and Open Architecture of Environmental Risk Management Information Systems, in: B. van der Walle (ed.), Information Systems for Emergency Management, M. E. Sharpe Publishers, ISBN 978-0-7656-2134-4, pp. 344-368, 2010

This paper discusses the current situation with respect to the parallel simulation of environmental phenomena. It is not based on a complete and thorough investigation of the state-of-the-art in this domain and is more driven by observations, experiences and ideas of the four contributors who see the need to raise awareness towards a more systemati...

The re-use of publicly funded governmental data has received a lot of attention recently. In the environmental domain, it is clear that improved public services need exchange of data across governments at all levels. Governments keep producing information products at all levels, and some of them are more or less readily available. Reporting obligat...

The CRISMA project is a European Union funded project focusing on the simulation of multi-sectoral large scale crisis scenarios that have multi-dimensional effects on society and people. The project aims at the development of a framework to build user centred tools which will allow decision-makers to cross-examine dynamic crisis scenario evolutions...

Results from global and regional climate scenario modelling predict significant changes in temperature and precipitation during the rest of the century. Episodes with extremely high temperatures and more intense rainfall will occur more often. Climate change will affect the urban environment and should be taken into account in long term and sustain...

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) defines the quality goals for European water bodies until 2027. Water bodies are managed on very different governmental levels in the member states. Due to the federal system, Germany has a complex structure of responsibilities regarding the management and maintenance of water bodies in Europe. The paper will...

Climate change and changing rainfall patterns are expected to have impact on drainage and combined sewer systems. Designers and operators of such systems will have to prepare for greater uncertainties in the effectiveness of drainage systems in the future, and there are indications that the performance of investigated CSO (combined sewer overflow)...

Decision makers involved in prevention of water contamination often lack the technical knowledge of water quality evaluation or the comprehension of complex software for environmental information management required to make effective decisions. Providing information about the environment is not an easy task due to its complex structure, rela-tionsh...

Results from global and regional climate scenario modelling predict significant changes in temperature and precipitation during the rest of the century. Episodes of extremely high temperatures and more intense rainfall will occur more often. Climate change will affect the urban environment and should be taken into account in long term and sustainab...

Environmental Information Systems (EIS) have become in very important tool for their capacity of manipulating huge amounts and heterogeneous types of data, and for their capacity to integrate different technologies in a single computational tool. The need of appropriate tools for diagnosis and increasingly accurate ecosystems forecasts, require dev...

Future air quality in large cities will not only depend on how sustainable the city administration will be in terms of how they introduce clean technologies and organize the energy, heating and transport systems. Urban air quality will also be affected by global, hemispheric and regional contributions of long-range transported pollutants, for which...

Environmental decision support systems (EDSS) are often constituted by a combination of several heterogeneous tools for data and information management, visualization, modelling and simulation, data analysis, reporting and so forth. EDSS need to be tailored towards specific decisions by human decisions makers and often require highly interactive co...

Information interoperability is a key issue for all large scale scientific programs. Sharing information amongst large groups of actors from overlapping science and policy communities is not just about making data freely available. It is a technical and managerial challenge if the information is supposed to be of high quality and reliability. A par...

Los Sistemas de Información Ambiental (SIA) se han convertido en herramientas extremadamente importantes, por su capacidad de manejar grandes cantidades y heterogéneos tipos de datos, así como por su capacidad de integrar diferentes tecnologías en una única herramienta computacional. El principal objetivo del trabajo aquí presentado, fue diseñar y...

Der Beitrag beschreibt eine Plattform für die Entwicklung von Informationssystemen, bei denen die den Nutzer unterstützenden Geschäftsprozesse eine Vielzahl von heterogenen Informationsquellen, Geschäftsprozessen und Werkzeugen zusammenführen müssen, dar-unter auch Geo-Daten und Geo-Daten-Dienste. Diese – cids genannte – Plattform findet Anwendung...

Many decision makers are hindered in their daily work by “un-integrated” systems which can force them to move data around between tools which are only more or less compatible. Because environmental models play an important role in environmental decision support systems, the integration of models into user-friendly integrated decision support system...

This paper discusses the vision and requirements of a highly interactive workbench which supports decision makers using distributed resources including models as automated components of an integrated environmental decision support system. The concepts discussed are results of the SUDPLAN project, an EU FP7 project which aims at developing advanced...

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...

Sensor and earth observation data are becoming more and more available through service networks. In order to provide operational services, reliable and easy to use mechanisms for security, authentication and distributed access control are vital for service providers when offering their services. This paper describes a Service Access Control (SAC) f...

This paper gives an overview of a decision support system for scientists and city planners which shall be suitable to assess climate change effects on urban environments, and which shall enable city planners to investigate different measures to cope with potential effects of climate change. The system named SUDPLAN (Sustainable Urban Development Pl...

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...

SUDPLAN is an EU FP7 project combining IT and environmental knowhow in a novel way, bringing an easy-to-use, web-based decision support system for urban climate services. It will allow city planners to take climate change and its impact on the urban environment into account in the urban planning process. The main components of the SUDPLAN product a...

Risk management constitutes the set of preventative, integrated actions taken to deal with risk identification, analysis, and required measures during disasters. The ability to share all relevant data, especially in disasters that cross international borders, is often very limited because environmental risk management tasks are mainly handled by pu...

Collection of abstract service specifications of the ORCHESTRA Architecture

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...

Significant developments in both theory and application have been occurring in the areas of environmental information infrastructures and modelling environments for natural resource applications. These two areas share many common functions although, at present, coordination and integration of these has not occurred to any great extent. Models of en...

This document was developed as part of the ORCHESTRA project and is an OGC best practice for SDI reference models. The reference model RM-OA was developed under my leadership between 2004 and 2008. The document is co-authored by 32 collaborators. Thomas Usländer as the project chief architect is the editor of the best practice document of OGC.

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...

Risk management during disasters consists of the set of preventative, integrated actions taken to deal with risk identification, analysis, and mitigation. Information Technology (IT) plays a key role in this. However, the ability to share all relevant data, especially in disasters which cross international borders, is often very limited because ris...

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...

This paper is part of a series of ORCHESTRA contributions to ISESS 2007. For better understanding of this article, it is recommended to read the introduction paper (Usländer2 (2007)) first. The paper outlines the definition, implementation and application of semantic services in the context of a service-oriented architecture as developed by the ORC...

Annex to the ORCHESTRA Reference Model

Annex to the ORCHETSRA Reference Model

RIASSUNTO Scopo del progetto ORCHESTRA è migliorare l'efficienza nei processi di Gestione del Rischio ambientale attraverso lo sviluppo di una specifica architettura open-service basata su standard de-jure e de-facto. Lo sviluppo dei servizi in conformità all'architettura ORCHESTRA ne garantisce l'interoperabilità (in larga misura anche a livello s...

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...

RIASSUNTO Scopo del progetto ORCHESTRA è migliorare l'efficienza nei processi di Gestione del Rischio ambientale attraverso lo sviluppo di una specifica architettura open-service basata su standard de-jure e de-facto. Lo sviluppo dei servizi in conformità all'architettura ORCHESTRA ne garantisce l'interoperabilità (in larga misura anche a livello s...

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...

GIMMI2GIMMI IST-2001-34245 receives funding under the EU IST program.2 project, started in April 2002, aims at bridging the gap of communication in the pesticide impact assessment domain between data providers (soil, meteorology, agronomy, pesticide experts), scientists (chemists, geologists, modellers and academic institutions), service providers...

Many practical environmental assessment and management tasks are tasks which need to cross boundaries, in particular thematic, spatial, political and organisational boundaries. Typical examples are cross-border management of emergencies in Europe, eg flood management, where an IT system in practice would have to integrate data and information proce...

Environmental Information Systems (EIS) and Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS) are major building blocks in environmental management and science today. They are used at all levels of public bodies (community, state, national and international level), in science, in management and as information platforms towards the public. EIS and EDSS...

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 is a collection of documents related to user requirements for environmental risk management. It stems from the ORCHESTRA EU FP6 project (www.eu-orchestra.org) and has been compiled by Ralf Denzer as a one-shop-stop to this valuable resource of requirements.

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...

This volume contains a newly compiled version of the Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems 2005 (ISESS 2005), published by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) under ISBN 3-901882-21-9. The original version was a CDROM. This SECOND EDITION contains the newly edited proceedings as...

Due to organizational and technological barriers, actors involved in the management of natural or man-made risks cannot cooperate efficiently. In an attempt to solve some of these problems, the European Commission has made “Improving risk management” one of its strategic objectives of the IST programme. The integrated projects Orchestra (www.euorch...

This paper presents 3 systems for e-Administration, which are capable to integrate existing heterogeneous information systems in a way that reconfiguration of the overall system is made easy, thus making it adaptable to change in the business and information processes of the organization. The approach is based on a sophisticated set of middleware s...

The paper presents i-MARQ (Information System for Marine Aquatic Resources Quality), a project funded under the 5 th European Framework Program. i-MARQ started in May 2002. i-MARQ focusses on the use of advanced integrated decision support for Marine applications. The project is developing enhanced decision support paradigms which can optimally exp...

The paper presents a project called GIMMI (Geographical Information and Mathematical Model Inter-Operability), which is funded under the 5th European Framework Program. GIMMI will develop a middleware based system which is used for the pesticide impact assessment domain. This paper does neither look into the modelling aspects of the system nor into...

Management of environmental risks in coastal and marine waters is increasingly important, as regulatory policy moves from discharge compliance alone towards impact minimisation. Decision-making (for operational and remediation management) requires access to best quality information on key environmental quality parameters. However, current data reso...

In contemporary decision processes several types of information systems become more and more important. Geographical Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Models as well as Meta Information Systems can be combined to an Integrated Spatial Decision Support System (ISDSS) with a new dimension of possibilities for decision makers. With ISDS w...

The education of non computer scientists in Information Technology basics becomes more important every day. We currently see a number of related effects in the educational and job market which force us to think about the requirements of minimal IT education for an engineer or a scientist. This paper raises, in the form of a case study, questions re...

Environmental Information Systems (EIS) and Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS) are major building blocks in environmental management and science today. They are used at all levels of public bodies (community, state, national and international level), in science, in management and as information platforms towards the public. EIS and EDSS...

The development of user interfaces for environmental information systems (EIS) can be a complex task due to heterogeneous data, including factual as well as geographic data. An easy-to-use user interface can be designed by projecting multi-dimensional catalog structures onto well-known tree structures. On the other hand, georeferenced objects lead...

This paper discusses issues related to the integration of distributed heterogeneous environmental information systems. Starting with a brief discussion of the integration problems, a general concept for integrating heterogeneous systems within a meta-information-based network is described. Meta data requirements for this type of integration are dev...

Many disciplines require decisions which are related to spatial information. In particular, most of the environmental decision processes are tightly related to the spatial properties of information. Environmental Decision Support Systems are therefore often related to the spatial properties of the underlying information and the required analysis me...

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

The WuNDa project intends to offer to the users in different sections of the environmental department of the city of Wuppertal an access to GIS-data and factual data by a unique and simple navigation user interface, based on internet/intranet techniques. The first step is a prototype for the management of contaminated sites but the system architect...

This presentation is for the implementation of a course concerning environmental information systems. The course consists of: a concentrated set of lectures; a World-Wide Web follow-up; decentralized authority for credit; and, the re-use of modules from other courses and programs. The project ECCEI (EU-Canada Curriculum on Environmental Informatics...

During the 1999 International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (ISESS), held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, a two day workshop was conducted to examine the nature and characteristics of environmental decision support systems (EDSS). A reasonable informal definition of the composition, effectiveness, characterization an...

The WuNDa project intends to offer to the users in different sections of the environmental department of the city of Wuppertal an access to GIS-data and factual data by a unique and simple navigation user interface, based on internet/intranet techniques. The first step is a prototype for the management of contaminated sites but the system architect...

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...

Information Technology (IT) is a useful tool for many information and decision processes related to environmental protection and management. We see IT used in such diverse areas as environmental monitoring, natural resource management, planning, public information and disaster management. Today, IT systems serve a broad range of application domains...

Environmental Data is nearly always a rather large collection of items which have a high complexity. Until today most of the software systems visualizing environmental data do not take this fact into account. With this paper, we will introduce a new graphical user interface paradigm, called dialogue shifts, which makes complex data sets easy to acc...

TEMSIS - Transnational Environmental Management Support and Information System is a cost effective transnational information service for environmental administrations. TEMSIS serves the exchange of environmental information, tele-cooperation and citizens information. Its main objective is the integration to existing heterogeneous information platfo...

Note: This is a paper presented at the ISESS 1998 Workshop. Papers of this workshop were not published in proceedings. Best papers of the workshop (including this paper) were the basis for a journal publication in EM&S (see Journals, same paper title). The paper discusses issues related to the integration of distributed heterogeneous environmental...

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...