E2SP: A New Environmental Reporting Platform in ASP Mode

Abstract

This paper aims at describing how the E2SP (Environmental Enterprise Service Provider) system supports the local and regional environmental agencies in fulfilling their daily reporting and data analysis activities, trough providing a cost effective Internet based data processing platform. The E2SP online reporting platform presented in this paper is partly funded by the European Commission in the eTEN program. The DPSIR model (Driving force – Pressure – State – Impact – Response), adopted Europe-wide as the reference model to manage and analyze the environmental issues, represents also the theoretical basis of the E2SP (Environmental Enterprise Service Provider) project funded by the European Commission in the e-TEN program. According to the DPSIR model and the legislative framework, all the environmental agencies in the Member States are in charge of measuring the State of the environment and evaluate the Impact; this implies a data analysis and reporting activity, which constitutes one of the core responsibilities of the agencies. The E2SP project offers a highly original approach to these activities trough the use of cutting edge information technologies, as it is based on the first environmental information system which combines the advantages of first-rate consolidated technology (such as Business Intelligence applied to a Data Warehouse type model) and innovative architecture tailored to environmental data management. The E2SP Environmental Information System supplies a wide range of environmental management tasks (such as integrating data, analysis, calculating indices and indicators, handling emission inventories, reporting, modelling, publishing information over the Internet, etc.) and tools for the integrated management and analysis of the different environmental issues pertinent to the territory (air, water, electromagnetism, emissions…). These features support efficiently the daily activities of different environmental public and private institutions, on different geographic scale from regional to local. Moreover, the sharing of a common set of operative and analytical tools and the usage of the same semantics can foster the adoption of homogeneous procedures for environmental decision support also at transboundary level. The E2SP platform delivers the above listed functionalities as services via Internet, according to the ASP model. The services are supplied by two service centres, whose architecture is based upon a Warehouse platform. They integrate the heterogeneous data coming from the operative level (monitoring systems, laboratory analyses, land registers, etc.) into a remote and homogeneous data repository. These data are processed by the analytical tools, such as the OLAP module (a typical Business Intelligence tool) for advanced reporting and statistical analysis, and by forecasting modelling tools. The access to the E2SP system is realized trough a Web Enterprise Portal.