GIMMI: Geographic Information and Mathematical Models Inter-operability

GIMMI2 project, started in April 2002, aims at bridging the gap of communication in the pesticide impact assessment domain between data providers (soil, meteorology, agronomy, pesticide experts), scientists (chemists, geologists, modellers and academic institutions), service providers (local and central governments, public administration bodies, private chemical industries manufacturing pesticides) and final users (agronomists, consultants and even citizens). This can be achieved by allowing the inter-operability via Web of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), environmental protection data and service (e.g. mathematical models) providers physically distributed, by providing the proper IT structures to represent and manage temporal knowledge, and by integrating state-of-the-art legacy systems for document management and report generation. The main results of GIMMI will be an open Web brokerage system supporting different web-services such as: On-line Data Access to seek and drill down into huge amount of distributed Geographic Information; On/Off-line Simulations allowing interrelation of distributed databases to run mathematical models. ‘‘Open systems’’ means that new data and service providers can easily be integrated in the running system while remaining autonomous. The validation scenario chosen for GIMMI is the field of pesticides impact assessment in agriculture practices and Land Protection, by the adoption of four alternative EC-validated pesticide leaching models.