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Auflistung nach Autor:in "Athanasiadis, Ioannis N."

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  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Complementary software solutions for efficient timber logging and trade management
    (Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Environmental Informatics - Informatics for Environmental Protection, Sustainable Development and Risk Management, 2014) Anastasiadou, Despina; Koulinas, Kostas; Kiourtsis, Fotis; Athanasiadis, Ioannis N.
    Timber logging and trade is a complex system with important environmental, but also economic and societal dimensions. Today, the timber market has become global, not only for high-valued timber products, but also for technical and fire wood. At the same time, illegal logging is a common hurdle in almost all stages of the timber lifecycle from forest to market, creating a positive feedback cycle that starts with local environmental degradation and leads to severe impacts on global climate change. Timber certification and traceability are key aspects that may ensure supply-chain transparency, illegal logging mitigation, and forest management sustainability. Information systems have a central role to play in an application domain that is hardly digitized, such as forestry. Providing innovative technological solutions to support the daily work of the local forest service is critical, but the integration of ICT technologies in their operations is indeed a challenging endeavour. In this paper, a set of complementary software solutions is presented that aim to assist timber logging, transportation and trade management, and consequently to support efficient wood certification. The paper also outlines how forest service staff perceptions were integrated at an early stage in the design and development phase in order to increase system usability and maximise the potential for technology assimilation.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Delivering Environmental Knowledge: a Semantic Approach
    (Environmental Informatics and Systems Research, 2007) Rizzoli, Andrea E.; Athanasiadis, Ioannis N.; Villa, Ferdinando
    Environmental informatics delivers techniques and tools for archiving and processing environmental data. The advent of the Internet had positively affected the availability and ease of access to large and diverse environmental databases, distributed all over the world. On the other hand, similar progress has not been matched by the availability of models and algorithms able to process these data, mostly because of the lack of standards in the annotation of the characteristics of environmental models. In this paper we advocate the need for the semantic annotation of environmental “knowledge”, encompassing models and data. The slow, but steady, introduction of the Semantic Web and the widespread use of ontologies for semantic annotation will allow environmental informatics to cover the gap in the access and usability of models and algorithms for environmental data processing.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Software Agents for Assessing Environmental Quality: Advantages and Limitations
    (Sh@ring – EnviroInfo 2004, 2004) Athanasiadis, Ioannis N.; Mitkas, Pericles A.
    The last decades, there has been a remarkable change in modern societies. Environmental values are appreciated to a greater extent, as it has become evident that they are highly correlated with our quality of life. The aftermath of the growing societal interest in the environment and sustainable development was the emerging need for providing environmental information to the public. The challenge for Environmental Management and Assessment Information Systems is to provide efficient, accurate and timely electronic services to the public. In this work, we examine the applicability of software agent technology for automating the environmental quality assessment process. Software agents are best suited in systems that are modular, decentralized, changeable, ill-structured and complex, according to Van Dyke Parunak (1999). Environmental management and assessment systems are of this kind, and employing software agents to realize them makes possible the provision of advanced features. However, certain limitations may arise. Both advantages and limitations of agent-based applications for environmental monitoring and assessment systems are connected with real-world functionality. Environmental Management and Assessment Information Systems is a generic term that covers software systems responsible for 1. gathering environmental information from dissimilar data sources, 2. managing environmental data for supporting the decision making process involved in environmental assessment, and 3. post-processing data and facts for supplying citizens, industry, public institutions and government with information services related to the natural environment. Developing such systems is a demanding task, which requires interdisciplinary efforts originated from natural and environmental sciences, social and economic sciences, and informatics and computer science. In a schematic representation, we consider Environmental Management and Assessment Information Systems to be built upon the junction of environmental informatics, integrated assessment and decision support systems, shown in Figure 1. For such systems the challenge is to take advantage of the information technology tools, and integrate them seamlessly in the current procedures for providing services to all peers, including the government, the industry, public institutions and the society. Advances in the Information Technology sector seem capable to meet the demanding requirements for building environmental information services. Current developments in software engineering have brought forth software agent technology. The key abstraction used is that of an agent, i.e. a software entity characterized by autonomy, reactivity, pro-activity, and social ability. Certain types of software agents have abilities to infer rationally and support the decision making process. Agent-based systems may rely on a single agent, but the advantages of this initiative are revealed in the case of Multi-Agent Systems, which consist of a community of co-operating agents. Several agents, structured in groups, can share perceptions and operate synergistically to achieve overall goals (Jennings, Sycara and Wooldridge 1999). In this background, software agents could be considered in three distinct, yet concurrent ways: a. Agents as information carriers, i.e. as autonomous entities capable for processing information. b. Agents as decision-makers that comprehend their environment and respond to it, taking advantage of their abilities to reason rationally and behave proactively. c. Agents as societal illustrators, capable to achieve common goals synergistically, through the collaboration of autonomous individual actions. This triple view on software agents is illustrated in Figure 1. In our recent developments, we have combined these three approaches for building intelligent software applications for environmental management and assessment (Athanasiadis and Mitkas 2004, Athanasiadis et al. 2003, 2004).
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Towards a semantic framework for wildlife modeling
    (Proceedings of the 28th Conference on Environmental Informatics - Informatics for Environmental Protection, Sustainable Development and Risk Management, 2014) Athanasiadis, Ioannis N.; Villa, Ferdinando; Examiliotou, Georgina; Iliopoulos, Yorgos; Mertzanis, Yorgos
    In this paper we present work in progress for developing a semantic modeling system for wildlife monitoring, management and conservation. Based on a Greek NGO experience in large carnivores conservation in the mountain ecosystems of northern Greece, we present a generic architecture for wildlife information fusion, sharing and reuse. Our framework employs ontologies for representing the key domain concepts and their relationships, and applies them for integrating sensory information from GPS/GSM animal tracking devices, along with other field data and habitat suitability models.
  • Konferenzbeitrag
    Towards an air pollution health study data management system - A case study from a smoky Swiss railway
    (EnviroInfo & ICT4S, Adjunct Proceedings, 2015) Papoutsoglou, Evangelia; Samourkasidis, Argyrios; Tsai, Ming-Yi; Davey, Mark; Ineichen, Alex; Eeftens, Marloes; Athanasiadis, Ioannis N.
    In air pollution health studies, measurements are conducted intensively but only periodically at numerous locations in a variety of environments (indoors, outdoors, personal). Often a variety of instruments are used to measure various pollutants ranging from gases (eg, CO, NO2, O3, VOCs, PAHs) to particulate matter (eg, particles smaller than 2.5um: PM2.5, PM10, ultrafine particles: UFP), and including other environmental parameters such as temperature, relative humidity, GPS position. As a result it is always a significant challenge for researchers to effectively QA/QC, combine, and archive these data so as to reliably assess peoples exposure to poor air quality. With the CEDAR system presented here we aim to provide a solution to this problem by employing a platform using templates for easily reading custom formatted files, apply rules for filtering and quality checking measurements, and ultimately publishing them as services on the web. The system is demonstrated for the case an air quality project conducted in a Swiss railway station where smoking is allowed.