CROSS-Fire : a risk management decision support system on the Grid

Abstract

The CROSS-Fire project aims to develop a grid-based risk management decision support system for the Civil Protection (CP) authorities, using forest fires as the main case study and FireStation as a standalone CAD application to simulate the fire spread over complex topography. CROSS-Fire approach is based in an architecture that includes: information models, encodings, and metadata that represent the scientific knowledge associated to FireStation execution models and standards to enable the discovery and access of Web services, data repository, sensor networks and data processing facilities. To achieve the desired integration of information and services we use: i) EGEE to provide raw technological capability provision, including data management and storage, access to meta-data data bases and high-performance computing and ii) a Geospatial Information Infrastructure based on OCG-WS and SWE Web services to provide the access and management of remote geospatial data and virtualized sensor networks. This article, stresses the relevance of standards adoption of OGC-WS by describing the work that is been done to provide G-FireStation with: i) a standard-based SDI layer, based on Geoserver to exploit/enable geospatial services for data access/processing and ii) a 52N’s implementation of a OGC-SWE compatible layer, to address sensors CP data sources, such as meteorological stations data and satellite images and iii) the development of G-FireStation graphical user interface to access the platform facilities. The core of the CROSS-Fire Platform is a WPS 52North OGC standard layer divided into three interoperable components, respectively, the CROSS-Fire Business Logic, the Grid Services and Geospatial Services. WPS serves as an interface to a wide range of distributed computing resources provides the mechanism to access the grid facilities for processing and data management and including all the algorithms, calculation, or model that operates on spatially referenced data, also mediating all the communication with the portal and other GUI clients. The G-FireStation user interface that is currently under development is an open-source desktop with GIS and CAD capabilities that exploits an SDI client complying with OGC-WS and EU INSPIRE directives. It provides facilities to locate and access the spatial data infrastructure and to visualize the fire propagation, based on the native facilities of gvSig, it was also extended to support a OGC WPS client that mediate all the interactions with the core WPS service layer.