Open Service-oriented Architecture for Environmental Risk Management Applications

Risk management during disasters consists of the set of preventative, integrated actions taken to deal with risk identification, analysis, and mitigation. Information Technology (IT) plays a key role in this. However, the ability to share all relevant data, especially in disasters which cross international borders, is often very limited because risk management tasks are mainly handled by public institutions on a variety of administrative levels, each with their own IT systems. The integrated EU project ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management, http://www.eu-orchestra.org) has taken up this IT challenge. ORCHESTRA specifies, implements and demonstrates an open, service-oriented architecture to improve the syntactic and semantic interoperability of risk management applications. The architectural approach is specified in the Reference Model for the ORCHESTRA Architecture (RM-OA). The architecture design follows the ISO/IEC 10746 Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing and adapts it to service-oriented architectures. This paper illustrates the vision, the major IT challenges and the architectural elements of the RM-OA. It motivates the architectural design decisions from the perspective of the requirements triangle “user requirements”, “system requirements” and “compliance to existing and emerging standards”. The paper also provides an overview about the specification and the specification process of the information and service viewpoints including their rules to map to a chosen service platform, here W3C Web Services. The paper concludes with an outlook about the future role of semantic technologies in such geospatial architectures.