Dr V.I. Britchkovski

Belarussian State University of Informatics and Radiolelectronics

It is very important to strengthen incentives for the development and use of promising new technologies that can make our environment a healthy place for ourselves and our children.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) could play a key role in assisting regions to successfully meet these challenges. ICT might provide the tools to effectively capture, query, and present data.

It is also necessary to provide methods by which data, ideas, and documents may be shared among an increasing number of organizations, businesses, and individuals involved into the problems of the sustainable ecological development. Needs which should be addressed include the following:

•Ability to access and share data in a timely manner regardless of its location and stewardship - across regions among the organizations involved in environmental management, among local, federal governments, and with the general public.

•Enhanced ability to summarize, report, and display data for decision makers and other users.

•Ability of the regulated community to provide required information electronically.

•Ability to automate collection of field data and its interface with office systems.

However, in spite of the availability of advanced ICT, appropriate software tools (see URL http://www.cis-software.de) their efficient usage is restricted because of the problems of unintereoperability, incompatibility, etc.

A general strategy for meeting these needs and challenges and supporting goals, and objectives is to integrate software tools, information and systems across the regions. This could be a long-term effort which will be carried out as a series of short-term projects to develop and implement usable systems which are integrated and which enhance the value of existing tools, systems or systems to be developed.

The objective of the proposed integration approach is to facilitate sustainable ecological development and to protect, preserve, and enhance environment protection and promote the wise management of natural resources for the benefit of current and future generations.

It is extremely important to integrate available and emerging IT tools and products to build up a relevant IT infrastructure by establishing standards for application development (methods and tools), GIS software, data base management software, data mining software.

Ecological requirements are changing dramatically with more cross-problem issues, public initiatives and more world wide approaches which put more emphasis on information sharing and integration across countries.

IT integration project for ecological sustainable development (ITIPECOS) could help to respond to these requirements in a more effective way.

This project will contribute significantly to the goals of improving ecological service delivery, making information more accessible.

Integration of all the technologies within the regional framework will enable to improve accessibility, quality and use of the data needed to better understand changes in the capacity of regional ecosystems to support sustainable development and to make more informed decisions about how to manage changes.

Such problems as changes in land quality, freshwater resources, pollution and toxicity, loss of biodiversity could be regarded as target topics for demonstration projects.

The tasks of monitoring land, air and water to measure environmental status, trends and results, to increase our ability to characterize, measure and communicate environmental conditions and trends could be addressed.

In the centre of integration concept lies an approach based on the idea of using metadata.

It allows to integrate in the large, where different components participate in multiple integration efforts. There is significant overlap in the metadata requirements of several important integration scenarios, which presents an opportunity to increase an efficiency of ICT applications through metadata reuse. What is most striking is that all the metadata captured to support the unary case is useful for every other integration scenario. It is anticipated that similar reuse will be possible with mediators (intelligent agents).

In addition, because the unary metadata provides improved or alternate documentation of an individual components, it can be used in other efforts in which that component participates. This approach is presented in more details in/These Proceedings: V.I. Britchkovski

Using a metadata approach for integration of the information components in the ecological systems support /.

Some key technologies that are additionally needed at application level to make all this happen, include:

•Roaming agents. The new environment will be populated with electronic intelligent agents of all types. End user should have personal agents that look after their interests; and sniffer agents will be sitting on the network, at all times, collecting information to do system management or simply looking for trends. Agent technology includes cross-platform scripting engines, workflow, and Java-like mobile code environments that allow agents to live on any machine on the network.

•Rich data management. This includes active multimedia compound documents that you can move, store, view, and edit in-place anywhere on the network. Again, most nodes on the network should provide compound document technology -- for example, OLE - for doing mobile information object management. Of course, this environment must also be able to support existing record-based structured data including SQL databases.

•Intelligent self-managing entities. With the introduction of new multi-threaded, high-volume, network-ready desktop operating systems, we anticipate a world where a lot of machines can be both clients and servers. Therefore distributed software that knows how to manage and configure itself and protect itself against threats is needed

•Intelligent middleware. The distributed environment must provide the semblance of a single system-image across different client/server machines

In the long run a lot of critical IT related goals with the regard to ecosystem support could be achieved:

Use information technology to enhance ecological programs and thereby optimize service delivery.

Explore emerging technologies through pilot or demonstration projects. Examples include GIS, imaging, groupware, knowledge management, multimedia, networking, IP communications (including IP-telephony, Web casting, etc)

Maintain and enhance the regional communications network to facilitate data sharing and integration within and among existing programs.

"Clean" and update data to assure that data is accurate and current.

Further develop and implement a seamless, integrated environment and provide decision-makers at all levels within the organizations with efficient and effective access to information and decision-support tools.

Further develop and implement technologies that enable citizens to conveniently access information from homes, businesses, libraries, and other locations to increase government responsiveness and public satisfaction.

Implement improved security practices that better protect data integrity and better prevent the disclosure of information that might violate personal privacy or jeopardize government interests defined in law.

Promote additional strategic alliances with other consortia and groups, agencies, academia, and industry in order to exchange IT solutions and improve service to end users.

Continue to use information engineering and project management methods and tools to implement more efficient and effective IT solutions in the ecosystems.

Other benefits will be evident in the near future:

•Increased, ready access to current, needed information, regardless of location or data stewardship.

•Reduced redundancies of data and applications.

•Improved data quality, reliability, and timeliness.

Results of the project will provide the following additional long-term benefits:

•Increased security of key information and multi-media information integration (across ecological program areas), and geographic-basic analysis will be possible.

•Reduced application, software, and hardware maintenance activities

•Cross-functional integration of information.

•Increased application development efficiencies through the use of accepted information engineering standards and methodologies.

Making use of the knowledge and technologies developed by this integration project will make it possible to meet a wide range of social and economic needs so reconciling economic development