Generic integration of environmental decision support systems – state-of-the-art

Environmental Information Systems (EIS) and Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS) are major building blocks in environmental management and science today. They are used at all levels of public bodies (community, state, national and international level), in science, in management and as information platforms towards the public. EIS and EDSS are usually said to have certain characteristics, which distinguish them from standard information systems, e.g. information complexity in time and space or uncompleteness or fuzzyness of data items. By the very nature of the complex tasks involved, different methodologies can be an option while developing new system, for instance modelling, decision theoretic approaches, artificial intelligence, geographical analysis, statistics and many more. As software developers, we face the situation where we have to recompose these different methodologies in different application scenarios over and over again. This paper discusses the question, how different EIS and EDSS tools can be integrated in a generic way. For this purpose, we discuss a number of integration strategies and give two examples of current EU-funded projects.