VisREACHER: A FOSS Environmental Decision Support Systems for Odense River Basin in Demark

Environmental process researches express the complex model results by using complicated style, e.g. functions, tables, diagraphs and so on. Furthermore, running those models can take large amount of time. These will add the difficulties of decision support process especially when the stakeholders are not experts of this disciplinary. Therefore, the user interface design for such a system is very important which should maintain the scientific model structure and also simplify the interaction with models. Meanwhile, as the decision support system can be used to evaluate the effects of different alternatives, the user interface also should have the ability to render the new scenarios as soon as possible. In this project, we developed one prototype of WebDSS system, named VisREACHER, based on several open source programs: Mapserver, Openlayers, GeoEXT and PostGIS. We put our original water quality model results into a Bayersian Network model to generate the possibilities of future scenarios and then put those possibilities outputs into the postGIS spatial database in order to link with the entire river basin’s topology. After that, we create several vector layers to link with the database which are clickable and editable. By this structure, users can interact with the map-based user interface and input their own assumptions with quick responses. In this way of representing the models, users can get the spatial information quickly and try their own alternatives without running the original water quality model again. These FOSS programs are flexible and powerful in representing spatial information over the map layers. In this paper, Firstly, we will analysis the user requirements of our working package. Secondly, the concept design of this web-based application is given. Thirdly, the technique details are described in following section. Then, the preliminary results are represented. Last but not least, several conclusions and comments are revealed.