GEORD - An Open Data Warehouse Architecture for Environmental Data

摘要

For the sake of quick implementation, information systems are often tailored towards specific tools for editing, processing and querying of data. They normally have a high structural dependency on the tools used to build them, which usually makes changes to other tools and technologies both difficult and costly. As product cycles in software industry are constantly getting shorter, we have to face the rapid aging of existing tools, while the data involved still show growing longevity. Thus, a stable basement in terms of data, which supports the deployment of various different technologies at the interface level while preserving the internal structures, is of utmost importance. This is even more true in the context of geographical information systems (GIS), which are used for representing spatial contexts of environmental data, such as the sampling of pollution or noise and the water quality of wells, lakes, and rivers. In order to meet the requirements to gather, manage, and exploit various environmental data with complex structures, huge volumes, and geo-referencing, the GEORD architecture was developed in 1992 to suit the purposes of the Vienna City Administration and has been continuously enhanced since then.