The prevention, mitigation and planning phases of risk management are crucial in reducing the consequences of disasters, but different procedures, data formats and systems can often hinder efficient cooperation and the effective end of such phases. An innovative approach aims to solve the interoperability problem by bringing down cross-organizational and cross-country barriers. The ORCHESTRA standards-based open software architecture promises to overcome the procedural, technological and communications obstacles that can prevent different agencies involved in risk management from cooperating effectively. By ensuring interoperability between systems and data, the architecture will allow the main actors in different regions and countries to cooperate more effectively than merely exchanging raw data. “Our architecture will allow interoperable risk management services to be created to overcome the barriers between different actors who use different procedures, databases, systems and languages,” explains José Esteban, the coordinator of the IST programme-funded ORCHESTRA project at Atos Origin in Spain. “Through ensuring interoperability, different risk management stakeholders – be they public administrations, regional agencies or private companies – will have more information available sooner with which to prepare for or deal with a catastrophe.” Improved responses Information and time are perhaps the two most crucial factors in determining how well a disaster can be contained and controlled. And a lack of either can prove costly in terms of both lives and money. A number of IST-funded projects aim at tackling these issues of which ORCHESTRA is focusing on the harmonization of the exchange of risk management information. Floods, such as those that caused widespread devastation in Central Europe in 2002 and 2005 when several rivers burst their banks, would be better contained if authorities upstream could rapidly provide accurate river flow data and flood predictions to counterparts downstream even if they are located in another country. The response of authorities to severe storms, such as those which ground Scandinavian countries to a halt last winter, could be improved by sharing information between different local and state agencies on the worst affected areas. And forest fires, like those that ravaged the Iberian Peninsula last summer, would be fought more effectively if the coordination between different fire departments, meteorologists and civil defence services was enhanced to allow resources to be deployed more quickly and effectively. Responses to man-made disasters would also benefit from improved coordination, allowing public authorities as well as private companies to share more comprehensive information in the event of an oil tanker spill or chemical plant fire, for example. “The management of any kind of crisis would benefit from systems operating over this architecture, although especially those in which multiple parties in different countries are involved,” the coordinator says. In that regard, the partners are researching on domain ontologies to achieve semantic interoperability. The ORCHESTRA open services architecture will form the basis for the development of interoperable services by using international standards and the de facto OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard, among others, to permit compatibility. “The standards-based approach aims to ensure compatibility between systems, databases and services including those that are already in use by different public administrations across Europe,” Esteban says. “We also wanted to make sure the architecture was open so it can be employed by anyone in virtually any context.” ORCHESTRA on trial To validate the architecture, several field trials using Web services and focusing on a range of risk management scenarios are being considered for the coming months. “One possibility we are looking at is a multi-risk management system for the region of Catalonia that could be used to predict the effects of forest fires, the resulting sediment transport in a river passing through an industrial area, and its impact on the coastal zone. Another would focus on the response to a landslide blocking roads between Italy and France, and would provide authorities with information on alternative routes and an analysis of the economic losses from transport disruption,” Esteban says. “We are also looking to use the architecture for a system to monitor the levels of pollution caused by ship coatings in the German Bight, while another pilot would aim at supporting decision makers in the European Commission to more efficiently integrate European information to assess the risk of forest fires and the vulnerability towards floods and droughts within the Member States of the European Union.” The coordinator indicates that the pilots will probably continue to be used at the test sites after the project ends in August 2007, ahead of a first phase of commercialisation. “There is extensive interest in the ORCHESTRA architecture from both public administrations and private companies,” he notes. The work of the ORCHESTRA researchers is also contributing to two other important initiatives, INSPIRE and GMES, which are aimed at spatial data harmonization, and enhanced or new services for the environment and security respectively. Source: Based on information from EU's IST