The WISDOM Information System- Its architecture and potential for a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)

Kurzfassung

One goal of the German-Vietnamese research project WISDOM (Water-related Information System for the sustainable Development of the Mekong Delta) is to design and implement a web-based information system that serves as a sharing platform for scientists as well as local decision makers in Vietnam. This work, therefore, describes the setup of the web-based geographic information system which was designed and implemented to reach the goal in WISDOM. As the Vietnamese government propagated to use open source software to reduce license costs, the WISDOM Information System (IS) is based on open source components. Furthermore, its architecture was designed to be service oriented to decouple the client from the server. It allows the management of heterogeneous data such as spatial data, in-situ sensor observations, articles, reports and statistical data from the different data producers within the project consortium. To keep data up to date, one key aspect of the system is to support data ingestion of different data formats. It accepts new data in common formats like GeoTIFF or ESRI shape file in combination with an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) conform Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD). Metadata information is standardized to ISO-19115 and ISO-19139 defined by the International Standardization Organization (ISO). On the other hand, the huge amount of data, derived to answer the diverse research questions within the WISDOM project, must be made accessible for the users in a user friendly way. To achieve this, discovery and viewing services like Web Catalogue Service (CSW) and the Web Map Service (WMS) are used to distribute the information over the Internet. The distributed information can be visualized in different ways. The WISDOM IS offers a web-mapping application which allows viewing the results in a standard web browser without having to install any software. The knowledge produced by the WISDOM project consortium can therefore be transported to any user that has access to the Internet. As the WISDOM IS follows the principles of a service oriented architecture (SOA) and uses standards propagated by OGC and ISO it can function as one hub in a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in Vietnam or in the whole Mekong Delta Region.