Use of OGC web standard for a spatio-temporal enabled SDI for civil protection

In the last years, Geographic Information technologies have reached a mature state, providing a platform to support interoperability among different providers and users through Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). However, Civil Protection applications have specific requirements that make them different from typical Earth System Sciences research applications. Currently SDIs and the ESDI (European Spatial Data Infrastructure) only partially address user needs as they offer no or very limited time variable management. The main objective of the work presented here, which presents the achievements of the EU project BRISEIDE, was to develop a complete software architecture in that could provide the user with the possibility to interact with geographic spatio-temporal information through a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The challenge is to define a complex architecture, which is able to provide several kinds of geographic services (images, multidimensional raster data, sensor information, features and processing features) in a unique 2D/3D environment allowing the user to easily interact with the web services and functions. The deployed services enable sharing of geospatial information even with temporal dimension, a fundamental requirement for Civil Protection applications. The services are accessible through a multi-platform 3D client, developed during the project, which also allows interactive orchestration of spatio-temporal WPSs (Web Processing Services) by providing support to chaining of required processing units.