MORIS – MEDEA or Using Ecological Tools for Monitoring of Meteorological Extreme Events

Abstract

MORIS is an information system originally designed for the Austrian part of the UN-ECE “Integrated Monitoring” program. The requirements of an information system for heterogeneous and changing data led us to an object relational data model, with a predefined core ontology and end user defined extensions. This information system has proven to be effective for many different ecological topics, so that we dare say that MORIS is a universal information system for ecological data. Due to our success using MORIS in various ecological fields, when the need of an information system for meteorological extreme events came up, we checked the suitability of MORIS. When we started analyzing this problem, it seemed that “event” is a very broad and imprecise concept, hard to model in a normalised manner. On more detailed analysis, we realized that nature driven events like heavy precipitation or an avalanche are quite similar to man driven events like a campaign or a sample. Once these general decisions have been reached, creating the end-user defined classes and importing the instances turned out to be just as easy as with the ecological topics This leads to our assertion that MORIS is an appropriate tool for monitoring natural ecological events, and that the object oriented data model is an appropriate data-model for data-integration.