Governance of a service-oriented architecture for environmental and public security

Research for the application of technical support in environmental projects has grown rapidly due to the progress of sensor network systems and the large, scalable IT infrastructures that can unify and expand them. There are numerous attempts to make use of new technologies in order to serve environmental purposes. The research presented in this paper focuses on critical aspects of the core infrastructure of a project that aims to serve these purposes as well. The nature of the actions that must be taken against environmental disasters, which are our target use cases, dictate that extended, cross-organizational information and communication systems are engaged. In order to integrate information from different sources and process heterogeneous services, the IT infrastructure is based on the paradigm of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). However, the distributed and often very large nature of an SOA leads to a need for governance mechanisms. We present an SOA governance approach targeted to serve the purposes of large-scale distributed IT landscapes for environmental and public security.