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University of Milano Bicocca
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20126 Milan
Italy
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» Project

Localised environmental and health information services (Lenvis)

A generic Decision Support Network


There is a growing demand for real time and integrated environmental and health risk information. Provision of location-based services linked to the state of the environment at particular geographical locations is necessary for improving the quality of life. This is essential for mitigation of environmental-related health threats associated to water quantity and quality, and outdoor air pollution.

The main goal of the Lenvis project is to develop an innovative collaborative decision support network for exchange of location-based environmental and health services between stakeholders. Lenvis includes health indicators as integral part of the environmental management. Lenvis furthermore aims at supporting governments in communication with the general public and in particular to address the young generation Y, by entering popular digital social networks. This is done by development of a generic ICT solution on the basis of service-oriented-architecture (SOA), providing data, information and modelling services.

The approach will be validated through test cases on fresh surface water and outdoor air quality in the Netherlands, Portugal and Italy. Lenvis facilitates collaboration between different stakeholders, such as environmental protection agencies, health institutions and service providers, policy makers, citizens in general and environmental communities in Europe.

The first ideas of a generic design of the Lenvis decision support network


Through the development and integration of novel ICT solution it combines:

  • SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), enabling collaborative services and a more efficient fusion of environmental data and modelling services and health risk assessment indicators. These components are termed as Service Provider Peers (SPP);
  • Collaborative environment, facilitating collaboration between the end-users, in particular the EU citizens. These components are termed as User Peers (UP);
  • The network management component, in order to assure the quality and security of the data and information provision on the Lenvis network. These components are termed as Network Management Peers (NMP).




The SPP is a generic environmental service provider. Each SPP will provide one or more service sets and the interface to the service bus. A service repository will contain the descriptions of the services. Environmental service providers register their services in this repository and service consumers access the repository to discover the services being provided. The SPP can provide quality labelled data, connections to sensor networks and telemetry data, domain related modelling services or they can combine services from other Lenvis and non Lenvis service providers (e.g. meteorological and geo services, Google map services, etc.). The SPPs will cooperate according to a SOA approach.

The UPs create the basis of the collaborative network. The main goal of this socio-technical network is to facilitate exchange of environmental and health-related data, information, feedback, analysis, models, documents, multimedia and other information between the stakeholders and EU citizens on a certain geographical location and about certain catchments, urban area or ecosystem. The NMP provides the link between the first two components. The key real-time functionalities of NMPs are registration of all peers on the network, registration of available services on the network, user profiles management, management of meta information (dynamic) and routing of users.

The Lenvis project aims at research and development of an architecture and technical solution for integration of services, linking water, air and health domains, providing information through a user centric decision support network.