Semantics for notifying Events in the Affecting Environment

Michels Henry, Maué Patrick

Abstract

Geographic processes continuously change our environment. They trigger events with sometimes devastating impact on human life, such as flood due to heavy rainfall, or a drought due to lack of it. Some are beneficial, like the rain ending the drought. Humans have always been trying to understand environmental changes in their immediate envi-ronment. They want to be informed about tomorrow's weather conditions, the decrease of their city's air quality, or the long-term impacts of the climate change on the daily lives. Environmental models producing this information ex-ist. But their inherit complexity of environmental models and the plethora of solutions to encode and publish spatial data require in-depth ICT knowledge to correctly interpret the resulting predictions. In addition, citizens are usually not interested about all the details of the processes. They often just want to be informed if caused events have an im-pact on the daily live. In this paper we present a proposal for a notification system for events in a user's affecting en-vironment. Semantics help to let users define the events they are inter-ested in, without the requirement to know all the details of the underlying environmental models. The implementation is based on the Publish/Subscribe pattern and a web-based portal for an intuitive user interface to formulate the events the user is interested in.