An open source information system for integrated water bassin management

This thesis aims at researching on how the current stage of hydroinformatics modelling could evolve with relevance to new European (and international) water resource management policies analysing IT solutions such as standardisation and openness (intended as open source code). This thesis demonstrates the applicability of the open source approach to hydroinformatics and its relevance to integration of software components through a case study. This case study consists of the development of an Object-Oriented and OpenGIS supported pilot information system taking into consideration the fundamental Open technologies and Open Standards. The pilot information system uses Java as core programming language; SQL as data base language in its first implementation; the OpenGIS consortium Specifications as standard for the GIS enabled components. The system integrates open source projects like OpenMap as geographical information system and PostgreSQL with PostGIS extension as relational database. Besides, this research work intends to demonstrate the importance and the relevance of the object oriented approach at data management level in hydroinformatic applications. Consequently an evolution of the IS developed is also proposed. At a first stage all the component of the IS are based on object oriented technologies except for the data management level based on a relational database. This is because the relational logic still represents the uncontested choice of information system for developers in hydroinformatics despite the “Object - Relational impedance mismatch”. We studied solutions to address this issue and therefore we presented our experience in testing two different technologies for developing an object oriented data management layer: (i) the Java solution to obtain transparent persistence, the Java Data Object Technology (JDO); (ii) a purer Object solution with a light Open Source Object Database, Db4o. The process for implementing the two technologies in the hydro-Information System is described and the two different solutions are analysed and compared.

LEONE Andrea; 

2011-08-31

University of Liverpool

JRC64620