Environmental ‘live‘-monitoring utilizing geoKnowledge Design principles

Abstract

Within the scope of this paper, we present a new and enhanced strategy in organizing ‘live’ GIS enabled monitoring of environmental parameters based on ‘geoKnowledge Design patterns. This approach is able to enhance the broad and sustainable availability of environmental sensing information for an increasing spatially enabled society. The proposed concept is based on and combines the principles of GeoDesign, Open Knowledge and Open Government Data to leverage the potential of environmental resources collected and monitored by public and private organizations around the world. It aims to realize the full potential formalized processes, tools and components utilizing distributed spatial information infrastructures. This is especially important for opening vast amounts of environmental monitoring ‘live’ data and derived information to different domains and user groups in a structured and harmonized manner. The approach is based on generic building blocks that can be (re)used, (re)combined, (re)scaled and cognitively (re)assembled in an iterative manner, sharing formalized information and knowledge pieces. To validate this strategy in the context of environmental monitoring with regard to a transparent integration into geographic information systems, the ‘SenSer Toolbox Family’ as a set of service components for environmental ‘live’ monitoring has been developed showing the strengths, benefits and challenges of this new formalization principles for the sustainable availability and utilization of environmental information.