Environmental Information Systems

ISBN-13: 9783540609261 / Angielski / Twarda / 1998 / 244 str.

Oliver Gunther

Opis

Environmental information systems are concerned with the management of soil, water, air and species in the world around us. This textbook describes a framework for systems based on four phases of data processing: data capture, aggregation, storage, and analysis. The first part of the text concerns the collection of environmental raw data. The second part explains how this raw data is condensed and enriched to extract semantically meaningful entities. How aggregated data is then stored in a file or database is described in the third part of the text. In the final section the available information is prepared for decision support purposes.

Spis treści

1. Introduction.- 2. Data Capture.- 3. Data Storage.- 4. Data Analysis and Decision Support..- 5. Metadata Management.- 6. Conclusions.- List of URLs.- References.

Blurb

Environmental information systems are concerned with the management of data about the soil, the water, the air, and the species in the world around us. This is the first textbook on the topic. It presents a conceptual framework for environmental information systems by structuring the data flow into four phases: data capture, data storage, data analysis, and metadata management. This flow corresponds to a complex aggregation process during which the incoming raw date is gradually transformed into concise documents that can be used for high-level decision support. The book covers the concepts underlying this process, including statistical classification, data fusion, uncertainty management, knowledge based systems, GIS, spatial databases, multidimensional access methods, object-oriented databases, simulation models, and Internet-based information management. It also presents several case studies of environmental information systems in practice.