Data management in multidisciplinary research projects with the River Basin information System

Abstract

For the development of strategies for sustainable land management various different tools from different disciplines are needed. Especially there should be tools to deal with the data management and presentation. A tool in the field of environmental data which focuses on this goal is the River Basin Information System (RBIS) which has been developed at the Department of Geoinformatics at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. RBIS is a web-based, modular structured platform for environmental data management and data sharing and addresses the management, analysis, visualization and presentation of different types of data in the context of multidisciplinary environmental planning (http://www.rbis.uni-jena.de). The system is used in several inter-/multi-/ and transdisciplinary research projects e.g. “TFO - The Future Okavango” (www.future-okavango.org) or “LUCCi” (www.lucci-vietnam.info) and is based on open source software (e.g. MapServer, PostgreSQL, …) ensuring a cost-efficient deployment and operation. A main focus of RBIS lies in the maintenance of metadata to ensure that information about data provenance, genesis and responsibility are not lost during processing steps applied by external tools or internal functionalities. The corresponding RBIS module stores meta-information about different data types (e.g. time series data) and offers flexible user interfaces for their visualization and manipulation. Since the origin of the system lies in the field of environmental modeling one main module deals with the management of measured and simulated time series data. Beside user-friendly import and export routines and interfaces for analysis and visualization, it provides functionalities for gap detection, rule-based gap filling and statistical analyses. Another main RBIS module allows the management and visualization of vector and gridded geo-data together with associated meta-information according to the ISO 19115 standard. Moreover all datasets (e.g. station, soil, vegetation, observations, …) described by coordinates or an area can be automatically displayed and linked to a map. Moreover, RBIS features additional modules to maintain input and output data for environmental simulation models and store documents. Due to special linkage functionality, data from different RBIS modules can be associated with each other to form problem-tailored views for environmental managers and other users. RBIS is also a standalone part of the Integrated Landscape Management System (ILMS) (http://ilms.uni-jena.de) , which is a modular software integrating different steps of environmental system analysis and planning in a flexible and user-friendly workflow. Therefore RBIS provides different interfaces to access and insert data from external tools. Latest developments are mainly in the field of the user and permission management, introduction of Multilanguage support (current available languages are English, German, Vietnamese, Portuguese and Spanish) and the development of new modules related to new data types (e.g. water management infrastructure). We will give an overview about the system, latest developments and current applications.