Environmental Services Infrastructure with Ontologies – A Decision Support Framework

Abstract

An important challenge for today’s environmental applications is to support the migration of environmental models to be provided as a service on the Web, and to be able to use other services, in the context of a potential wider environmental user community of service providers and service consumers. We refer to this shift in the way environmental modes are provided as Model-as-a-Service (MaaS). This paper briefly presents MaaS and introduces ENVISION – an easy-to-use framework to support the emerging MaaS paradigm. We propose a general architecture (comprising components ranging from environmental Web portals to semantic service annotations to adaptive service chains execution) for ENVISION. Our architectural choices are motivated and validated by two scenarios (one from oils spill and the other from landslide monitoring and analysis), which we present in this paper. Finally, we identify a set of general scenarios supported by the ENVISION framework.