A Virtual Research Environment for Long-Term Monitoring of a Waste Deposit with Free and Open Source Software

Abstract

Environmental management projects are carried out by ecologists and engineers. The practical work is often supported by interdisciplinary research groups from different institutions which are responsible for the development of monitoring and data handling programs. The outcomes of these programs will be heavily influenced by various research philosophies and sampling strategies. This leads not only to different data bases, but also to incomparable spatiotemporal data sets. To combine the information on individuals, chemical substances and other biotic and abiotic materials as well as socio-economic data a virtual research environment (VRE) concerning environmental management has to be worked out. Facilities of data sharing, interactive data collaboration and storage, and communication procedures by metadata are in the focus of a VRE. It has to be optimized by Web 2.0 and other collaboration tools. From this background, the FOSS application “GeoNetwork – Opensource” (GNOS) is aimed to be used as a central component for data management in a VRE. Based on international standards, GNOS includes interoperability, metadata and geographical references as well as user groups with different authorisation levels. In this paper, a VRE concerning the long-term-monitoring of a waste deposit and its impact on groundwater quality will be discussed. Keywords: Virtual research environment, data management, long-term-monitoring, meta data, waste deposit, groundwater, GeoNetwork