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Auflistung Environmental Informatics 2006 nach Erscheinungsdatum
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- KonferenzbeitragImplementation of Data Sources for Analysis of Obligatory Level of Taxa Determination for Routine Biomonitoring(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Nemethova, Danka; Jarkovsky, Jiri; Gelnarova, Eva; Kubosova, Klara; Racek, Jaroslav; Hodovsky, JanAlthough taxonomy or generally biological determination is unavoidable indication component in most of ecological risk assessment studies, its implementation in standard methodical guidelines is often limited by complicated structure of biological communities. The species richness thus increases cost of the determination as well as requirements for experts and time. Our aim here is to document feasibility of optimizing reduction of taxonomic units that are necessary to guarantee still representative and safe scenario of risk assessment studies. This analysis should ensure i) acquisition of information on relationship between the communities and their environment, ii) decreased time and financial costs paid for taxonomic determination, iii) prevention of wrong determination with no relevance to the assessed situation. The proposed environmentally-oriented scoring of taxa consists of two steps, both requires also experts from given biological field and therefore are community-specific. First of all, the index of determination quality and the index of taxon indicative power are computed over reference data set. In the second step, the analysis of valences, similarity of species traits and joint occurrence of species are used for their aggregation in taxonomic tree where we can easily find the proper “cut-off” levels. Proper taxonomic level should be characterized by low demand on determination, however accompanied with still clear association with environmental conditions. The proposed scoring of macrozoobenthos taxa was tested over the dataset of more than 600 reference and contaminated sites. The data sources for analysis are databases of the Czech national information systems storing long-term environmental monitoring data. The results will be incorporated in the standard biomonitoring network of the Czech Republic according to implementation rules of WFD EU.
- KonferenzbeitragPredicting Aggregate Properties of Soil Communities vs. Community Structure in an Agricultural Setting(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Demsar, Damjan; Dzeroski, Saso; Debeljak, Marko; Krogh, Paul HenningIncreasing amounts of environmental data are being collected. With environmental data, we often encounter the situation of having to predict several target variables of similar type, such as biomasses of different species. This situation is usually handled by computing an aggregate target variable (like total biomass or a biodiversity measure) and then predicting the aggregate variable. Another possible (but rarely taken) approach is to model all target variables and then calculate the aggregate variable from the model outputs. In this paper, we try to answer the question whether the simpler approach of producing one model for the aggregate target variable is worse than the more complex approach of producing multiple models and then calculating the aggregate variable from the model outputs. We do this by taking a dataset describing the agricultural events and soil biological parameters as independent variables and a set of microarthropod species biomasses as dependent variables. We calculated several aggregate target variables such as total biomass, Shannon biodiversity and species richness from the original data. We build models to predict these directly, and also build separate predictive models for the biomass of the microarthropod species and calculate the aggregate target variables from the outputs of these models. We compared the aggregate variables calculated from the measured data, the aggregate variables predicted directly and the aggregate variables calculated from the outputs of the models for individual species using the Parson correlation coefficient and two additional error measures. Our results show, that in most cases first calculating the aggregate variables, and then learning models to predict these directly yields better results than modeling individual species and then calculating the aggregate variables from the predictions of these models.
- KonferenzbeitragOn Approaches to Ecosystem Modelling(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Gnauck, AlbrechtAnalysis, control and management of ecosystems are complex tasks which have to cover broad ranges of operating environmental states and decision making. Current approaches to ecosystems modelling and simulation are mostly based on information theory, thermodynamics, topology, or balances of biological and chemical components. Ecosystems are considered from the point of view of information theory as complex dynamic communication networks with living and non-living components and their interrelationships. Mostly, state space approaches are used for ecosystem management. But these models give no answer to structural ecosystem changes. The relational ecology approach covers more the structural problems of ecosystem modelling. The relations are given qualitatively, but cannot be quantified. The network approach seems to be the most appropriate approach to include behavioural and structural changes of ecosystems in models.
- KonferenzbeitragFirst Steps Towards an Integrated Decision Support System for Water Management(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Shumilov, Serge; Erdenberger, Thomas; Cremers, Armin B.; Bharati, Luna; Plotnikova, Maria; Rodger, CharlesThe ultimate objective of the Glowa-Volta Project (GVP) is to develop a Decision Support System (DSS) for the management of Volta Basin water resources that is scientifically sound and relevant to the needs and interests of diverse water sector stakeholders. An integrated economic-hydrologic model has been developed at catchment and basin scale, and preliminary output demonstrates the value of integrated analysis in evaluating water-energy sector interactions. This paper presents our first efforts to link GAMS and WaSiM models and the first prototype of the DSS.
- KonferenzbeitragWeb Usage Analysis for Assessing and Improving Metadata Quality(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Krieger, Rolf; Schöpflin-Reichmann, Elke; Sattler, Thomas; Schäfer, KerstinDue to Directive 2003/4/EC on public access to environmental information public authorities have invested large amounts of money and time in metadata management projects. For instance, in Germany the Environmental Data Catalogue was designed as a Web-based meta information system for retrieving environmental information held by public authorities. The benefits of the system depend on the quality of the metadata provided. As well-known data quality is expressed in several dimensions, e.g. accessibility, completeness, relevancy, timeliness etc.. To guarantee a high metadata quality public authorities have to develop a long-term metadata management strategy concerning the Environmental Data Catalogue. At a tactical level this requires a continuous monitoring of the usage of the Environmental Data Catalogue. One attractive strategy for analyzing the usage of the system is the analysis of log files provided by the Environmental Data Catalogue. But to our knowledge only a few German authorities, e.g. the State Institute for Environment, Measurement and Nature Conservation Baden Württemberg, have started to analyse the UDK-log files continuously in a systematic way. The reasons are: (a) The UDK-software only provides rudimentary support for managing the logging process. (b) It is difficult to analyse the log files because there are no metrics and no tool for analyzing the application-specific log files of the Environmental Data Catalogue. Due to these facts in our contribution we present procedures, metrics and a tool for analysing the specific UDK-log files. The UDK Log-File-Analyser receives the daily log files as input, aggregates and analyses the data and provides a summary report, a weekly report, an error report and a search term evaluation report as result. The reports list several metrics (e.g. number of sessions and object views, list of most popular UDK-objects, list of most popular search terms etc.). The statistics are presented in tabular and graphical form. Using our tool we analysed the daily log files of the Environmental Data Catalogue of the German State of Baden-Württemberg from October 1st, 2003 to October 31st, 2004. Thereby we identified several data quality problems with respect to content and accessibility. To solve these problems, we derived several activities from our empirical study. For instance based on the search term evaluation report produced by our tool the most popular keywords can be identified. Assigning these keywords to relevant UDK-objects improves the accessibility of the data. In addition our tool provides a list of search terms for which the Environmental Data Catalogue has not delivered relevant objects. This list can help identify missing objects. Adding these objects improves the completeness of data. In summary, with our tool and metrics public authorities have instruments for guiding their meta data management and for improving metadata quality concerning the Environmental Data Catalogue. Moreover, our results show that web usage analysis is a promising way to gain insights into the environmental information demand of the public.
- KonferenzbeitragData Quality Mining in Ontologies for Utilities(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Grüning, FabianThe energy market in Europe underlies several diversifications. Through the pressure of the European Union the former monopolistic companies are forced to open the market and allow competition with newcomers in order to gain an economically and ecologically more efficient energy market. This new situation has implications on the IT-infrastructure of those companies so that grown databases have to be integrated into the new company’s structures. As with every long-living database and especially with a data integration process there are emerging problems with the data quality. In a current project we decided to use the domain ontology CIM (common information model) to remodel and integrate those data sources. This paper deals with the data quality problems resulting from the long used databases and the integration process. Therefore a definition of data quality is introduced and an overview of the algorithm classes needed for fulfilling the defined requirements is given as well as an explanation for the term data quality mining. The discussed topics will then be represented in an ontology that is used to specify the knowledge needed for and the processes of data quality mining and which will be merged with the domain ontology to execute data quality management.
- KonferenzbeitragNear Real-time Comparison of Air Quality Data Across European Cities and Regions(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) van den Elshout, Sef; Leger, Karine; Heich, Hermann; Hodges, Nick; Nussion, Fabio
- KonferenzbeitragUsing Decision Trees to Predict Forest Stand Height and Canopy Cover from LANDSAT and LIDAR Data(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Dzeroski, Saso; Kobler, Andrej; Gjorgjioski, Valentin; Panov, PanceThe motivation for this study was to improve the consistency and accuracy, and increase the spatial resolution of some of the supporting information to the forest monitoring system in Slovenia by using data mining techniques. Specifically we aim to generate raster maps with 25 m horizontal resolution of forest stand height and canopy cover, for the Kras region of Slovenia. We used predictive models based on multi-temporal Landsat data and calibrated it with high resolution airborne laser scanning (ALS) data. The visual inspection by a forestry expert of the resulting maps showed that the generated maps corresponded to the actual forest cover in the Kras region, both in terms of forest stand height as well as canopy cover.
- KonferenzbeitragSelf-Monitoring as Part of the National Reporting Commitments Specialised Software from Descriptive Models(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) Fischer, Tilman; Mohr, Ingo; Müller, Wolfgang; van Nouhuys, Jo; Pfaff, HubertusHessian sewage plants (Hessische Abwasseranlagen HAA) supports the processes around the monitoring and administration of sewage plants in the communal area. Besides the monitoring of approx. 2.000 sewage plants/sewers in the future also 5.000 private/small sewage plants will be liable to report within the scope of the Hessian “Eigenkontrollverordnung” (EKVO, self inspection). At present a new highly flexible data entry and transmission software is realised for that purpose. This software platform can also be used as a pattern for other environmental domains to provide data entry and transmission to the responsible authorities like federal states, countries or the EU. It is designed to fulfil self-monitoring and reporting obligations of each Member State as demanded by the EU, according to the “General Principles of Monitoring” and E-Government standards.
- KonferenzbeitragSustainable Communities: A Strategic Framework for the Digital Age(Managing Environmental Knowledge, 2006) von Behrens, RolfThe speed at which next generation online communities of affinity are implemented will directly affect the innovative capacity, social cohesion and environmental sustainability of a country or community. Such technologies have the potential to transcend institutional, geographic and social boundaries in order to help us move towards a sustainable and participatory society. This paper discusses key opportunities and leverage points for investment towards an open, innovative, inclusive and sustainable society. It is aimed at governments, businesses, community organisations and concerned individuals.