BRISEIDE a spatio-temporal framework to support environmental analysis and emergency management

Large scale natural disasters such as landslides, e arthquakes, forest fires or fresh floods, require a d quate IT tools to help operators better plan resources and improve re action to unexpected events by deploying the most a ppropriate response model and contingency plan. To do so decis ion makers, civil protection operators, public admi nistrators typically need to be capable of accessing, distribu ting and processing a wide range of information inc luding, but not limited to, Earth Observation data, geographical in formation within GIS repositories, as well as live s nsor data. Being able to access these resources from a unique 3D interactive environment, which acts as a one-stophop, it ensures essential improvement in terms of efficiency, thus reducing possibility of errors. This work presents the results of the ongoing EU-fu nded project BRISEIDE BRIdging SErvices, Informat ion and Data for Europe (www.briseide.eu), which is being f inanced by ICT-PSP Programme. BRISEIDE specifically ddresses civil protection scenarios by developing an interoperable Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), w hich provides not only interoperable access to data but also to p rocessing functionalities. To do so BRISEIDE has de veloped a number of interoperable web-services that are not o ly able to deal with spatial features but also wit h temporal dimension. This way it becomes possible for the civil protection operators to perform spatio-temporal an lysis, essential to run comprehensive spatio-temporal queries o f historical data and to perform simulations of sce narios of crisis. The possibility to retrieve or query datasets based on time properties is a fundamental requirement of the BRISEIDE framework. For this the fundamental step forward ha s been the definition of a data model which allows operating on spatial datasets which consider time as true dimens ion. With regard to this issue, it must be noted th at Open Geospatial Consortium (OCG) standards such as WMS (Web Ma p Service) and WCS (Web Coverage Service), in their latest versions, formally support time as dimension. T he requirement, set by the project, was to define a dat /metadata model that considered time as a variable in a way t h t could be supported through OGC-compliant reques ts. The aforementioned protocols support in fact the TemporalDomain element, which may or may not be referring to a sp tialDomain element. In this specific case the T mporalDomain element describes the valid time constraints that can be associated to requests sent by the BRISEIDE 3D c lient to create a virtual scene (e.g. through GetMap or GetCov-