Integrated Solution Support System for Water Management

Solving water management problems involves technical, social, economic, political and legal challenges and thus requires an integrated approach involving people from different backgrounds and roles. The integrated approach has been given a prominent role within the European Union¿s Water Framework Directive (WFD). The WFD requires an integrated approach in water management to achieve good ecological status of all water bodies. It consists amongst others of the following main planning stages: describing objectives, assessing present state, identifying gaps between objectives and present state, developing management plan, implementing measures and evaluating their impacts. The directive prescribes broad participation and consultation to achieve its objectives. Besides the obvious desktop software, such an integrated approach can benefit from using a variety of support tools. In addition to tools for specific tasks such as numerical models and questionnaires, knowledge bases on options and process support tools may be utilized. Water stress, defined as the lack of water of appropriate quality is one issue related to, but not specifically addressed by the WFD. However, like in the WFD, a participatory approach could be used to mitigate water stress. Similarly various tools can or need to be used in such a complex process. In the AquaStress Integrated project the Integrated Solution Support System (I3S ¿ I-triple-S) is developed. One of the cornerstones of the approach taken in AquaStress is that organizing available knowledge provides sufficient information to improve the possibility to make a water stress mitigation process truly end-user driven, meaning that dedicated local information is only collected after specific need is expressed by the stakeholders in the process. The novelty of the I3S lies in the combination of such knowledge stored in knowledge-bases, with adaptable workflow management facilities and with specific task-oriented tools ¿ all originating from different sources. This paper describes the I3S

Data integration technologies to support integrated modelling

Over the recent years the scientific activities of our organisation in large research projects show a shifting priority from model integration to the integration of data itself. Our work in several large projects on integrated modelling for impact assessment studies has clearly shown the importance of data availability for integrated modelling, but of no less importance is the integration, or alignment, of the required input data itself. Moving from the fairly technical model integration in OpenMI and OpenMI related projects, and moving towards basic semantic integration in the SEAMLESS and SENSOR projects, our focus is now shifting towards researching and applying techniques such as Semantic Web technologies to improve data discoverability, its integration, and in the future on reasoning about the constructed integrated knowledge. This paper will present an overview of the on-going work in our European 7th Framework Programme (FP7) project TREES4FUTURE, focussing on automated harvesting of forestry related data sets and enriching its meta data for search ability; the FP7 LIAISE Network of Excellence on linking impact assessment instruments such as models and data to sustainability expertise; and the FP7 research project SEMAGROW on developing visions on processing and querying large RDF triple-stores of integrated agricultural data. In the end we aim at bringing the results of all these projects together to achieve a next step in integrated modelling and to present ways to use Natural Language Processing based methods to help providing meta data