Database design of a geo-environmental information system

Abstract

Environmental protection from productive investments becomes a major task for enterprises and constitutes a critical competitiveness factor. The region of Central Greece presents many serious and particular environmental problems. An Environmental Geographic Information System is under development that will maintain necessary and available information, including existing environmental legislation, specific data rules, regulations, restrictions and actions of the primary sector, existing activities of the secondary and tertiary sectors and their influences. The system will provide information about the environmental status in each location with respect to water resources, soil and atmosphere, the existence of significant pollution sources, existing surveys, studies and measurements for high risk areas, the land use and legal status of locations and the infrastructure networks. In this paper, we present a Database Design that supports the above mentioned objectives and information provision. More specifically, we present examples of user queries that the system should be able to answer for extraction of useful information, the basic categorization of data that will be maintained by the system, a data model that is able to support such data maintenance and examine how existing indexing structures can be utilized for efficient processing of such queries. Copyright © 2014 SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications.