A FOSS BASED WEB GEO-SERVICE ARCHITECTURE FOR DATA MANAGEMENT IN COMPLEX WATER RESOURCES CONTEXTS

Advances in environmental monitoring systems from remote sensing to pervasive real and virtual sensor networks are enlarging the amount and types of data available at local and global scale at increasingly higher temporal and spatial resolution. However, accessing and integrating these data for modeling and operational purposes can be challenging and highly time consuming, particularly in complex physical and institutional contexts, where data are from different sources. The paper focuses on the design of a web geo-service architecture, based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), to enable collection and sharing of data coming from complex water resources domains and managed by multiple institutions. The heterogeneous nature of these data requires the combination of different geospatial data servers (Catalog Service for the Web, Web Map Service, Web Feature service, Sensor Observations Service) and interface technologies that enable interoperability of all complex resources data types. This is a key feature of web geo-service tools in multidata and multiowners environment. Besides the storage of the available hydrological data according to the Open Geospatial Consortium standards, the architecture provides a platform for comparatively analyzing alternative water management strategies. The architecture is developed for the Lake Como system (Italy), a regulated lake serving multiple and often competing water uses (irrigation, hydropower, flood control) in Northern Italy.