Project Overview

Monitoring, administration and planning of the territory are being configured through networks of interests which, for instance:

• Classify the territory in homogeneous ambits
• Collect geographic and non-geographic data
• Provide a data access through a distributed information system
• Run numerical applications to forecast events and consequences
• Use and distribute certified data
• Set up a problem solving environment and decision support systems

Autonomous and separate functional centers (nodes of the network) share and maintain, for instance:

• The knowledge of the territory
• The knowledge of environmental and anthropic data
• Simulation software and decision support systems
• Event predictions and analysis based on mathematical models
• Computing resources and large-scale acquisition systems
• The technology for data protection, access control and transmission security

The grand challenges of environmental sciences require computing power and storage capacity that hardly a single organization might acquire.

The diversity of environmental problems imposes the adoption of a cross-disciplinary approach, only possible through the development of problem solving models based on advanced information technologies, to set up virtual organizations sharing common interests and objectives providing high value-added complex services, accessible anywhere.
An advanced tool is being designed to provide a holistic description of the ecosystem, integrating human know-how, instrumentation, resources for data comunication, storage, visualization and computation.

• To supply functional centers with a wide area virtual organization system, based on the coordinated and reliable sharing of
  • Computing resources and acquisition instruments
  • Innovative numerical applications
• To adopt the paradigm of a distributed information system made up of
  • Data acquisition devices
  • Data Banks
  • Simulation software, data management and visualization
• To provide a uniform, transparent, easy but protected access to all available resources

• To study a Grid infrastructure and test a resource brokerage system within a virtual organization for the allocation of data and computational services running environmental applications accessible via web services and web portal. Such applications include:
  • Simulations
  • Visualization instruments data analysis
  • Data acquisition
• To provide an integrated solution to the environmental problem in terms of monitoring, management and planning for a sustainable ecosystem
• To elaborate business strategies. For example:
  • Sales of Grid portals and computing services
  • Consultancy and application development

• Hardware and software requirements