ICT Methodologies and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Air Quality Information Management

Applications for atmospheric pollution monitoring and modelling are fundamental tools to develop environmental policies oriented to control and possibly reduce the impact of pollution on ecosystems and human health. However, differences among monitoring systems and data availability are an important limitation in environmental management. In order to standardize protocols and procedures, the EU directives (e.g., INSPIRE, Air Quality Directive) and international programs (i.e., GEOSS) have oriented the community towards developing interoperable standardized systems that assure real time data analysis and dissemination. To coordinate national earth and cross-disciplinary systems for promoting GEOSS and to support the INSPIRE implementation, the GIIDA (Integrated and Interoperable Management of Environmental Data) project was launched. Within GIIDA the working group on air quality was instructed to develop an interoperable system for air quality information management. The system is based on open-source tools compliant with standards and designed to develop a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), which will contain information collected at ground-based as well as at off-shore monitoring sites. This infrastructure aims to store, mine and visualize information. The SDI will support modelling activities and environmental assessments for different scenarios in order to evaluate the impact of atmospheric pollution ecosystems and human health. In this paper we discuss the application of the IT framework and methodologies for the SDI development, which was built on open-source components: Postgis for data storage, Geoserver to export services and GeoNetwork for metadata generation. Finally, we describe the ICT pluggable framework GeoInt, which was developed to simplify the SDI component's complexity for end users by supporting data input from different sources, as well as metadata management.