Environmental data management with the River Basin Information System

Abstract

The River Basin Information System (RBIS), developed at the Department of Geoinformatics at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, provides a web-based platform for environmental data management and data sharing. It is a modular-structured, user-friendly information system that addresses the management, analysis, visualization and presentation of different types of data in the context of multidisciplinary environmental planning. RBIS is also a standalone part of the Integrated Landscape Management System (ILMS), which is a modular software integrating different steps of environmental systems analysis and planning in a flexible and user-friendly workflow. A main focus of RBIS (see Figure 1) lies in the maintenance of metadata to ensure that information about data provenance, genesis and responsibility are not lost during processing steps applied by external tools or internal functionalities. The corresponding RBIS module stores meta-information about different data types (e.g. time series data) and offers flexible user interfaces for their visualization and manipulation. Additional RBIS modules are used for the storage, management and analysis of various data types. One of them can be used for the management of measured and simulated time series data. Beside userfriendly import and export routines and interfaces for analysis and visualization, it provides functionalities for gap detection, rule-based gap filling and statistical analyses. Another RBIS module allows the management and visualization of vector and gridded geo-data together with associated meta-information according to the ISO 19115 standard. Moreover, RBIS features additional modules to manage vegetation and soil measurement data, maintain input and output data for environmental simulation models and store documents. Due to a special linkage functionality, data from different RBIS modules can be associated with each other to form problem-tailored views for environmental managers and other users. An overarching part of RBIS offers functionalities related to administration, e.g. a user and permission management, dataset ownership information or logging. In this paper we present the environmental information system RBIS as a standalone application and integrated part of ILMS for data management, analysis and exchange. The RBIS architecture will be presented as well as selected features for the management and visualization of environmental data. Further, processing and exchange functionalities in the context of the usage of RBIS in ILMS will be outlined. (Figure presented).