ENVIROFI: The Environmental Observation Web and its Service Applications within the Future Internet

Email: jose.lorenzo@atos.net

Funding: 4.9 million euro

Programme: FP7-2011-ICT-FI

Status: CLOSED

The Future Internet Public Private Partnership aims to advance Europe's competitiveness in Future Internet technologies and to support the emergence of Future Internet-enhanced applications of public and social relevance. ENVIROFI (www.envirofi.eu, twitter.com/ENVIROFI) developed a set of enablers through which all environmental data, whether they are generated from sensors, citizens, or models, become available at anytime and anywhere through the Internet in an open standardised usable format. Until today, we miss a standardised Open European wide, cross-domain and web-enabled solution for capturing, storing, processing and visualizing the currently growing volume, complexity and heterogeneity of observation data and data-sources. The main reasons for this situation can be traced back from both the shortcomings of available and scalable web service technologies; to the evolution of information systems and data models across thematic and geospatial domains. In order to overcome such problems, ENVIROFI strategically assured that the existing environmental resources can be used in multi-disciplinary applications, while at the same time the environmental applications take advantage of the emerging availability of Future Internet and communication technologies in Europe. Further challenges arose from the project decision point of view led to embracing volunteered geographic information (VGI) technologies, and the adoption of affordable smart sensing to effectively monitor the environment at highly localised resolutions. As a result, the participative community-generated environmental observations is now growing and will by far outweigh the centres specialising in environmental observations through traditional sensor networks. Nevertheless, the new growing wealth of information and data generated from communities cannot be immediately used by public administration, research and educational institutions and industries. This is simply due to the need for deploying new enablers which facilitate the overall aggregation, fusion, geospatial tagging and semantic alignment of the large and complex structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from participative communities sensing ENVIROFI motivated such enablement with requirements in accord with the Future Internet core platform of generic enablers specifications, while contributing into the overall FI-PPP enablement acceleration and validation of software applications in the Environmental Information Space. This Final Report documents the experience made by the European research project ENVIROFI as one of the usage area projects within the first phase of the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership programme. It describes the software components (environmental/specific enablers) which are required to connect with the domain-independent capabilities (generic enablers) of the Future Internet core platform for geospatially and environmentally-driven applications. ENVIROFI worked on three scenarios in the areas of biodiversity, human/environment interaction, and collaborative usage of marine data: 1. Bringing Biodiversity into the Future Internet: enabled biodiversity surveys with advanced ontologies; analysis, quality assurance and dissemination of biodiversity data 2. Personal Information System for air pollutants, allergens and meteorological conditions: enhance human to environment interaction; atmospheric conditions and pollution in “the palm of your hand” 3. Collaborative Usage of Marine Data Assets. Assess needs of key marine user communities; selection of representative marine use cases for further trial: leisure and tourism, ocean energy devices, aquaculture, oil spill alert

Keywords: Future Internet, Environmental Usage Area, Observation Web, Requirements Analysis,Environmental Enablers, Open Standards

Communities

MARINA

Themes

Climate change

Biodiversity

Hazard and the protection of coastal areas

Marine regions

Value not available

Related issues

Blue energy [Renewable energy (wave, wind, tidal)]

Maritime, coastal and cruise tourism

Fishing and aquaculture

Sectors

Tourism

Aquaculture

Fisheries

Oil and gas

Marine Protected Areas

Societal challenges

Health, demografic change and wellbeing

Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine maritime and inland water research and bioeconomy

Climate action, environment, resource and efficiency and raw materials

Type of stakeholders involved

Scientists and Research Organization

Industries and SMEs

Local Administrations and Municipalities

Citizen and Civil Society organization

Policy Makers organization and Implementers

RRI Dimensions

Ethics

Gender equality

Governance

Open access

Public engagement

Science education

Name Family name Email Organization Country
Jose Lorenzo jose.lorenzo@atos.net ATOS SPAIN S.A. Spain
Name Family name Email Organization Country
Denis Havlik Not available AIT AUSTRIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY GMBH Austria
Jose Lorenzo jose.lorenzo@atos.net ATOS SPAIN S.A. Spain
Wolfgang Dolezal Not available UMWELTBUNDESAMT GESELLSCHAFT MIT BESCHRANKTER HAFTUNG (UBA GMBH) Austria
Daniela Knorr Not available UBIMET GMBH Austria
Kris Engelen Not available JRC -JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE, EUROPEAN COMMISSION Belgium
Christoph Schulte Not available FRAUNHOFER GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER ANGEWANDTEN FORSCHUNG EV Germany
Uwe Herzog Not available EURESCOM-EUROPEAN INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH AND STRATEGIC STUDIES IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS GMBH Germany
Eero Hyvönen Not available AALTO-KORKEAKOULUSAATIO Finland
Fergal Ward Not available Intune Networks Limited Ireland
Sean Connolly Not available MARINE INSTITUTE Ireland
Paolo Mazzetti Not available CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE Italy
Paal Berg Not available NORSK INSTITUTT FOR LUFTFORSKNING STIFTELSE Norway
Arne-Jørgen Berre Not available STIFTELSEN SINTEF Norway
Colin Upstill Not available UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON United Kingdom

No RRI issues added yet.

WHAT DID THE PROJECT PRODUCE THAT IS RELATED TO RRI? What are the most RRI relevant outputs from the project (roadmaps, guidelines documents, reports, articles, videos, etc)

Title Project outputs
Link http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/100097_en.html.
Description Find it in cordis
Other type All available reports
How can the project contribute to improve the quality of the marine environment? -1. ENVIROFI contributes in European “smart living” by providing on-demand localised situation-aware information about the environment, to individual European Citizens or groups of Citizens. ENVIROFI reaches out to the needs of large numbers of stakeholder communities using integrated environmental information, with specific spatio-temporal coverage requirements. ENVIROFI will enable these communities to build robust and privacy preserving mobile applications for shared situation awareness, participatory sensing and crowdtasking and undertake new or existing businesses more efficiently and competitively in the ever-growing knowledge driven global economies.------------------------------2. Three Future Internet environment usage scenarios (Biodiversity, Atmospheric, and Marine) have been chosen in order to demonstrate that ENVIROFI project results will be widely applicable in many environmental domains and at multiple spatial scales. ENVIROFI has identified and implemented environmental enablers to operate in a multi-style service oriented architecture, leading to reusable services addressing semantics, meta-information enrichment, fusion and modelling capabilities for the marine, land and atmospheric usage domains. The TaxMeOn ontology model developed by ENVIROFI allows automated linking of the species names. The SERVUS methodology for service oriented design of information systems has also been refined, allowing systematic collection and description of use cases and resulting technical requirements.--------------------3. ENVIROFI will contribute in speeding up the process of gathering and further processing of environmental observations and derived information. It will increase the efficiency of data production and reuse by larger communities. The overall costs of data products should therefore decrease, thanks to better/faster production of information towards primary use (e.g. legal requirements) and also secondary uses (e.g. Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) Reports and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) reports) as well as mash-ups and re-use for 'not yet known or discovered purposes and business ideas. Such efforts will also allow more and better data to be captured in the first instance or for resources to be better allocated for increasing business efficiencies, particularly at a time of reduced budgets during the global economic crisis.-------------------------4. The ENVIROFI proposed technologies will contribute to the better quantification of the actual economic size of the market when many of the fragmented environmental processes and operations involved are observed, integrated and made available at various spatial scales to the wider communities under the Future Internet perspective.------------------5. The ENVIROFI Future Internet service infrastructure will make easier for large numbers of stakeholders including SMEs and industrial players (such as European telecommunications operators and service providers) to collaborate and create new smart products and services in the environmental, leisure, tourism, creative industries, renewable energy, sensor technology, digital communication and health market sectors. ENVIROFI will provide more accurate representations of biodiversity with the use of new biodiversity and ecosystem ontologies while providing services for automated surveying of biodiversity to larger communities using the Future Internet. With this put in place, new economic values of biodiversity usage (e.g. agriculture) will emerge.------------------------------------6. ENVIROFI will also empower open individualised experimentations and crowdsourcing communities with collective capability in monitoring the environment at high resolution. The Digital Earth Living Lab prepared by ENVIROFI provides the methodology to shape Digital Earth Applications through open innovation and mechanisms for community engagement and collaboration.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------7. ENVIROFI has also contributed to standardisation and other global initiatives. The fundamental services used in the environmental community are the geospatial and location based services developed in the geospatial community with OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), CEN/TC287 and ISO/TC211 on Geographic information and services. ENVIROFI partners (SINTEF, EC-JRC, CNR, AIT, IOSB and IT Innovation) are active in the Geospatial standards development and have contributed to enhance and add to these standards related to the needs of the environmental community. ENVIROFI has i) experimented with a SOS RESTful interface using GeoJson for encoding observations; ii) defined the Object of Interest concept for bridging the SWE “Feature of Interest” concept and Internet of Things “Thing” concept; and iii) proposed to create a working group in the OGC to align SWE and IoT overlaps.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------8. ENVIROFI has also identified opportunities for use of FI generic enablers in both the geospatial and the environmental communities and has also provided comprehensive specifications of open services interfaces using standards in the context of the Future Internet to assure openness and interoperability with legacy systems and new ones.9. Further, the project’s outcomes have also contributed to INSPIRE, in terms of data specifications and networking services for environmental observations. ENVIROFI has provided input to Data Specification testing of Annex II and III in the INSPIRE Directives.
Link to more info on the oucomes Not specified
What RRI-related difficulties were encountered? Not specified
Link to more info on the unexpected difficulties Not specified

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