Information Handling in Interdisciplinary, Hydroenvironment Engineering Projects

Abstract

Information handling in water-related interdisciplinary engineering projects is a demanding challenge due to the mass of data from field work, laboratory experiments and numerical simulation. This chapter describes a general concept for information handling in an interdisciplinary research unit using a generalized information modelling approach for multi-scale physical state variables in combination with metadata and Web services–based information systems following the INSPIRE initiative. The research unit deals with the coupling of flow and deformation processes for modelling the movement of natural slopes and integrates data and models from different disciplines such as hydrology, hydrodynamics, geohydraulics, geophysics and soil mechanics. Key idea is a generalized information modelling concept for any kind of physical state variables on different spatial and timescales using tensor and set theory from mathematics as well as object-oriented information modelling techniques. Tensor objects are used for the full information handling process from field data acquisition and management via information analysis and model coupling to information archiving and storage. A hydroinformatics system so-called Turtle has been developed using standard IC technology such as XML schemes for tensor objects (TensorML) and ISO 19115 and 19119 for metadata and geoportal-based interdisciplinary collaboration and long-term archiving and reuse of the relevant information.