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Environmental Software Systems Volume 6, Second Edition
Abstract and Figures
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 3-901882-21-9. The original version was a CDROM. This SECOND EDITION contains the newly edited proceedings as one document and has been produced with permission of the copyright holder, IFIP and IFIP WG5.11 “Computers and Environment”. The intention behind creating this SECOND EDITION was to make those volumes of ENVIRONMENTAL SOFTWARE SYSTEMS easily available on-line which are not available through a commercial publisher. This edition has been created based on the PDF’s of the original CDROM. As the grouping of the papers in the original version was a little scattered, a new table of contents has been created which is a little more compact.
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During the past decade, significant transformations in thefieldof water resources management in South Africa have been spurred by two sets of events:
Growing awareness that the increased exploitation of water resources to meet rising water demands in South African catchments, as well as the intensification of concomitant impacts on water quality, necessitate fresh approaches to water management.
The democratisation of the Republic of South Africa, initiated in the early 1990's, which brought the elimination of disparities between various sectors of South African society regarding access to resources, among which water is primary, to the forefront of the national agenda.
Primary among these transformations are, at the national level, the complete review of the Water Law of South Africa, and, at the international level, formal participation in the Water Sector of SADC (Southern African Development Community).
By March 1997 the Water Law Review process, which was structured around public participation as well as in-depth research, had yielded a number of Discussion Documents which would inform the formulation of a White Paper on a National Water Policy. Two of these Discussion Documents focus on aspects of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) and, particularly. Integrated Catchment Management (ICM) (DWAF& WRC, 1996; DWAF, 1997; see page v for full references). The process leading up to their publication engendered intense interest in and debate on these topics among all sectors of the water management community.
Simultaneous with these far-reaching developments inside South Africa, there unfolded initiatives in SADC to promote the practice of Integrated Water Resources Management among member states, in conjunction with initiatives by the Global Water Partnership (GWP). The GWP comprises a collaborative effort by a range of development-funding agencies and recipient-governments to coordinate capacity-building projects in the water field according to mutually agreed strategic plans.
Guidelines for Catchment Management • Preface Pace i
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It was soon realised that the aforementioned brief for the study was too lirruted in that it raised the profile of the Catchment Management Plan at the expense of the Catchment Management Process, whereas the Plan is but an element of the Process. The viability of water resource management in a catchment would depend more on the Process than on the Plan; consequently, the brief was rephrased to focus on Guidelines for the complete Catchment Management Process.
Parallel to the circulation of the first draft of this document, the drafting process of the New Water Bill got underway. In the Draft Bill the term Catchment Management Strategy was preferred to Catchment Management Plan, however, Plan appears to be very much imbedded in general usage. Consequently, the double term Strategy/Plan has been adopted for the final version of this document.
The White Paper on National Water Policy . published during the study, inter aha proposed an institutional framework for catchment management that seemed inadequate to ensure growth towards "ideal" ICM. This represented a "new" reality- that had to be accommodated in this document in the form of legislative guidelines to promote such growth.
The limited time-frame and resources for this study would not enable the Core Team to track all the requirements and stages of "ideal" ICM, nor would their relatively limited experience; therefore the Guidelines proposed here cannol claim to go beyond promoting a form of Catchment Management that is focused on integrated water resource management on a catchment basis, but with recognition of the mutual and sensitive dependence of water, land-use and aquatic ecology management.
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WATER RESEARCH COMMISSION
The Study Process
Thelimitedrimeframeandbudgetavailableforthestudynecessitatedafauiycondensedstudyprocess.
The Core Team met as a whole for two one-day Workshops, the first on 15 April 1997 to conceptualise
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the study and its deliverables, and the second on 23 Ma) 1997 to formulate the details of the individual
Guidelines and to evaluate the implications of thefreshly-publishedWhite Paper on a National Water Policy. Before and between these two Workshops individual Core Team members prepared Discussion Papers on specific topics and had interviews with a limited number of practitioners in relevant professional and researchfields,while on a number of occasions ad hoc discussions took place between two or three Core Team members. As this study unfolded, four conceptual adjustments of the original approach were required:
Guidelines ibr Calchmcnt Management - Preface Page in
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The Philosophy and Practice ofIntegrated Catchment Management: Implications for Water Resource Management in South Africa, 1996, Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) and Water Research Commission (WRC).
Research into Alternative Institutional Models for Integrated Water Resource Management in South Africa, 1 997, Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.
IntegratedWaterandLandManagementinSouthAfrica. 1996.MARabie,SAPublicLaw (1996), ( 11), pp 322 - 354.
WATER RESEARCH COMMISSION
• Background provided by the , "National Water Policyfor South Africa", by A Tanner
• Community participation and consultative infrastructure, by R Bengu.
The Legacy of Preceding Studies
Invaluable conceptual development regarding IWRM and 1CM look place in various South African studies during the past few years, some of whjch underlay the Water Law Review. In this study heavy reliance was placed on the insights emanating from documents produced by the forementioned studies Considerable paraphrasing of material in these documents was employed in formulating Part I below. To promote the flow of the discussion, specific references to individual sources have been omitted from Part I. Therefore, acknowledgements of the three main sources are given here:
TJie Arrow of Time
The arrow of time flies particularly rapidly in the sphere of transformation of water management in South Africa. By the time of publication of this document, some of the matenal in this document may already have been overtaken by insights yielded by many different strands of the transformation process, ranging from the outcome of the rapid drafting of the new National Water Bill and the re- positioning of DWAF, to implementation studies in preparation of the Bill's promulgation, to many "bottom-up" Catchment Management actions driven by the collaborative efforts of concerned inhabitants of particular catchments. This document should therefore not be seen as an all- encompassing manual on Catchment Management, but rather as one further step, at a particular moment, along South Africa's unfolding journey towards wiser resource management..
A simple software system is presented, meant primarily for IBM-PC-like equipment, based mainly upon a relatively flexible application of three types of algorithms:
aggregation of precedences
clustering and
simple structural analysis.
This software is meant as a probe in a broader project of constructing a system which would enable effective conduct of expert sessions aiming at the establishment and analysis of a quasi-model related to a problem domain under consideration. With that respect the software refers to some extent on the one hand to the ideas of precedence aggregation and clustering as well as interpretive modelling or analysis, and on the other hand to the AI- and expert-system related applications dealing with knowledge acquisition. As mentioned, though, it is primarily oriented at gathering experience at the present stage, and this purpose is the reason for differences with other existing software products.
The system as of now supports an expert session conducted, in one place and in one time segment, by a session manager with the help of an assistant and a PC-operator. Main stages of the session are:
notion elicitation, evaluation and ranking
establishment of a certain class of relations among notions
analysis of the thus obtained structural models.
The paper presents some results of experimental sessions.
The theme of our work is intelligent support to users in exploration of spatially referenced data. Under spatially referenced data we mean various thematic data (data on demography, economy, education, culture, history, etc.) referring to geographical objects or locations (countries, regions, cities and so on) rather than purely spatial data such as geometry of geographical objects and their relative positions with respect to other objects. Spatially referenced data cannot be effectively analyzed without representing them on maps. However, a number of different presentation techniques exist, and selection of proper techniques in accord with data characteristics is crucial for successful analysis. An improperly designed map can be unhelpful or even mislead the user into wrong conclusions.
We are considering the application of the data analysis methods in the case of the model of group decision making in which n judges express their opinions as to m options in the form of pairwise preference coefficients d
i
kl
∈ [0,1], where i,i ∈ I = {1,…,n}, denotes a judge and k,l ∈ = {1,…, m} denote options considered. Hence, the coefficients must not necessarily belong to {0,1}, but may also correspond to less definite preferences. It is obvious that the need for allowing such “fuzzy” (or “valued”) preference coefficients to be elicitated arises when the options are perceived through a number of criteria on which they may score in a very different manner, and the elicitation of these scores by every judge for every criterion would be much too cumbersome, if at all possible (considering e.g. the problem of identification of all the—independent—criteria).
In den letzten Jahren gewann der weltweite Handel auf Internet-Marktplätzen immer weiter an Bedeutung. Um sich mit seinem Marktplatz im Internet zu behaupten, ist es fair den Betreiber wichtig, von der Struktur und vom Aufbau her ein möglichst breites Publikum anzusprechen und an sich zu binden. Der Erfolg einer Handelsbörse zeichnet sich nicht allein durch die angebotenen Güter aus, sondern auch durch deren Verfügbarkeit und Erscheinungsbild im Internet. Vergleichbare Angebote gehören dazu ebenso wie eine einfache Handhabung der Börse sowohl fair
potentielle Interessenten als auch für Händler,die in der Börse ihre Angebote einstellen wollen. Dadurch wird Kommunikation zwischen den Beteiligten erleichtert. Auch für das Angebot von gebrauchten Industriemaschinen ist der Bedarf an elektronischen Marktplätzen in den letzten Jahren gewachsen. In diesem Beitrag beschränken wir uns auf die Darstellung eines geeigneten Klassifikationssystems, mit dem die Produkte ausreichend genau beschrieben und strukturiert werden können. Zum Übertragen der Produktkataloge soll eine entsprechende Katalogdokumentvorlage im XML-Formcit existieren. Die Daten werden über eine spezielle Schnittstelle mit Hilfe eines Mapping-Dokumentes in den Marktplatz eingelesen.
