Structures and organisation of an information tool dedicated to simulation and management of environmental risks

Many new services of public usefulness need geographic data to carry out their tasks. Therefore many of these services are based on Geographic Information System (GIS) products that are getting a great favour and diffusion of trade. Other services, as the instruments of navigation, the position detection on the territory of cars, make part of standard instrumentation, e.g. of a car, or represent central business of a company. At same way, they can support management systems which are characterised by a more complex architecture. We will examine the structure and organisation of a base-system that is dedicated to management of environmental risks and that easily must be specialised in a special application or a monitoring activity. In particular we will explain design lines of our platform Terrapack@ [1]. This one is structured in order to facilitate inclusion of simulation tools of environmental phenomena, guaranteeing integration of procedures and software tools [2] that are independently developed from specialists of specific field. By means of this architecture, we included and tested different tools of analysis and simulation, regarding risk management, e.g.: electromagnetic pollution in urban area [3], air pollution due to a smoke-stack [4] and forest fire propagation [5]. Moreover graphical tools are conveniently used to interpret physical data in their geographic location by establishing their mutual relation together with territorial data. Physical data can be detected on- line. At same way, resources can be controlled on-line and the system is conveniently oriented to manage emergency activities during an environmental disaster. Some management examples of environmental risk together with future applications will be shown and analysed.