International Journal of Remote Sensing Applications Vol. 2 Iss.

4, December 2012

Design and Implementation on Water

Environmental Data Sharing Platform
Laiping Luo1,2, Jing Zhang1*, Luqi Li1, Jia Jin1
Key Lab of 3D Information Acquisition and Application of Ministry of Education, Capital Normal University,
Beijing, China
1

Artificial Intelligence Institute, Beijing City University, Beijing, China

zhangjings@mail.cnu.edu.cn
Abstract
Water environment problem of large river basins is
increasingly serious in China. However, most of the data
provided by the entire water environment monitored
department is relatively independent and its format has
various types, which make it difficult to solve the problem in
a comprehensive way as to how to deal with the worsening
water environment. To solve the problem, design and
implementation on the sharing platform are expatiated based
on the authors more than 2 years practice on Water Project.
As achieved certain effect, this study not only has built a new
efficient and accurate geographical information support
platform and services which is cross-industry, cross-sector
and cross-platform, but also has implemented information
exchange on multiple fields. Thus it provides high quality
and efficient services of water environmental data to the
departments of urban planning, construction and
management.
Keywords
Data Sharing Platform; Water Environment; Design; Implement

Introduction
With the rapid development of economy, water
environmental problems closely related to humans
lives have come to the fore [1]. The state and all
government departments are paying more and more
attention to water environment [2]. And the water
environment problems are revealed through the
monitoring data, so to get this data fully and quickly
are important precondition as to solve the water
environment problems. However, nowadays, domestic
water environmental monitoring departments at
various levels report the relevant data to the upper
sections mainly in a manual way. And the present data
transport is lack of reliable internet-based
infrastructure and the data patterns used by different
watchdogs differ greatly [3]. As a result, it is common
that some problems often appear such as data lack,
project lack, illogical data and confusing data, etc. In

addition,
different
water
environment-related
departments often come across some problems as to
information barrier, isolated information, delayed
information sharing, and poor ability to make a
comprehensive decision, etc. The problems above
make it hard to fully use water environmental data so
that the governments at various levels cannot get
timely information on water environmental quality.
Whats more, these problems also greatly influence the
decision-making on controlling water environmental
problems. Thus, it is urgent to set up an integrated
water environmental data sharing platform.
Research Background
Presently, China has established a fairly complete
network with four levels of state-province-city-county
to monitor water environment, included more than
2300 monitoring stations (which can provide a large
amount of data for the water environmental quality
monitor and assessment)[4]. The majority of the
monitoring stations has begun to use information
technology like internet for submitting the data, but
due to lack more advanced information technology
and means, the monitoring data is converted to
another data by traditional statistics method, which
can only provide simple information [5]. Thus, the
monitoring data do not have access to more effectively
use, also cannot be deal with further analysis to
provide more valuable information about the water
environmental trends and risk management, what is
more serious is that more difficult to provide timely
and effective response control decisions when the
sudden water pollution events happened.
In recent years, the Chinese governments are paying
close attention on environment security, especially
after water pollution incident occurred in Songhua
River, the construction of environmental monitored
and warning platforms have being started in part of

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International Journal of Remote Sensing Applications Vol. 2 Iss. 4, December 2012

areas or part of water projects, like the water

environment security warning platform on the Three
Gorges Project has obtained the Chongqing city
governments approval to build, the water
environment monitoring system of Taihu basin has
started to build in Jiangsu Province, and these useful
platform or system are also being constructed in other
areas or cities [6] [7].
Although some environmental metadata standards
have developed by relevant departments in China, but
from the macroscopic view there is lack of uniform
water environmental metadata standard and
information sharing system [8]. If the governments fail
now to give some policy to sustain the research on the
technology of water information sharing platform, in
the future lacking of platform construction experience
and unified standards, different area will construct
their own platform in a different way; even different
regional of the same basin will do the same thing.
In order to enhance collection, transport, integration,
sharing as well as comprehensive analysis and
improve unified release ability of water environmental
data, so that the decision-making on water
environmental problems can be raised to a higher level.
A decision concerning how to set up water
environmental data sharing platform was made and
that platform would be studied as a special topic. As a
result, water environmental data supervising system
will be perfected and unified management and
data-sharing will be realized. Currently, in the
construction process of water environmental data
sharing platform, a construction guideline was
adopted, that is, research on key technology comes
first, and then demonstration and application follow
[9].
Platform Design
Research on sharing platform involves the key
technologies, functional model design, logical
architecture design and physical architecture design; it
is a systems engineering.
Key Technologies
Metadata
technology,
VPN-Based
Network
Construction
Technology,
CA-based
Water
Environmental Data Sharing Security Management
Technology, Web Service Technology and GIS
Technology are used to build the platform. These key

42

technologies have discussed in the authors another

paper
named
Key
Technology
of
Water
Environmental Data Sharing platformWith the
Sample of Liao River Basin in China which is indexed
by EI[9].
Functional Model Design
Functional model in this paper is defined as a
description on system from the conceptual and logical
levels. According to the system requirements of
sharing information providers and users, the
functional components and their relationships which
the system is required are defined in this functional
model. With the actual conditions of water
environment, the function model of water
environment sharing information platform is proposed
to metadata publishing, data publishing, data
retrieving and querying, metadata downloading, data
downloading as the main clue, based on the popular
sharing
system
architecture
at
home
and
abroad[10][11]. And the functional model is divided
into five parts of data management, data publishing
and service, platform management, metadata and its
standards management, platform click statistics (See
Fig.1). The main function of the sharing platform
involves the following: user registration, data
publishing, data examination, data querying, data
reading, data downloading, secure authentication and
background management etc. It is friability coupling
and service assembled among the parts of functional
model, thus it improves the adaptability and flexibility
of the platform services.
Logical Architecture Design
This platform is an important part of the National
Basic Qualification Platform on Science and
Technology. In order to integrate with the National
Sharing Platform, its technical architecture is necessary
consistent with the overall framework of National
Geo-spatial Data Sharing Services. And it is made up
of three levels: group of sharing database, technical
platform of sharing services, policies and standards of
sharing platform. As a result, the architecture of this
platform is design into N layers as data source layer,
data layer, application services layer, user layer(See
Fig.2), which can realize the data sharing services of
information exchanging, data integrating, and
application combining etc.

International Journal of Remote Sensing Applications Vol. 2 Iss. 4, December 2012

FIGURE 1 THE FUNCTIONAL MODEL OF THE SHARING PLATFORM

FIGURE 2 LOGICAL ARCHITECTURE

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International Journal of Remote Sensing Applications Vol. 2 Iss. 4, December 2012

1)

User Layer

User layer is the client of system hierarchy architecture.

Users get the services by clicking on the client browser.
2)

Application Services Layer

Application services layer is key module to support the

application and functions of the system, which
includes web servers and directory service servers. As
a middle layer of directory service servers and client
browser, the web servers are responsible for receiving
users requests, calling related services and giving the
handle results, also it provides friendly operating
interface while it masks the details of directory servers
implementation and complex functional interface. To
complete the requests of users login, registration of
metadata, metadata querying and other requests,
directory server provides services to the web server in
the background .So directory server is the core of this
platform.
3)

Physically this platform is consisting of a core center, a

certification center, a service registry center and three
branch centers (See Fig.3). The three branch centers are
Taihu Basin center, Liaohe Basin center and the Three
Gorges Basin center. Through the packets and coding
of VPN network, water environmental data establishes
such a temporary and safe link as to transport the data
in public network safely.

Data Layer

The directory of data layer is the basic data in this

platform, which is the abstract of all information
resources. The metadata is stored and managed in the
directory using Oracle database.
4)

Data Source Layer

Data source layer covers all digital and non-digital

information resources. Users can find the needed data
using the location information of metadata.
Physical Architecture Design
With the principles of scalability, reliability and load
balancing, the physical architecture uses network
technology based on VPN. VPN, Virtual Private
Network, is often defined as a network to construct a
temporary and safe link through a public network (e.g.
Internet), and a safe and stable tunnel to run through
confusing public network [12]. Using public
network-based VPN to construct water environmental
sharing platform is an effective solution to the security
problems in data resources sharing, exchange and
transport. And it can improve the utilization ratio of
data sharing resources. This study uses VPN-based
network construction technology to build water
environmental sharing network involving the state,
rivers, provinces, municipal governments and county
etc. in an attempt to transport data from government at
various levels [9].

44

FIGURE 3 PHYSICAL ARCHITECTURE

Implementation of Platform
The route of platforms business process is following:
(1) Constructing a centralized metadata database.
(2)Data sharing provider registers metadata when the
metadata of sharing data is stored into metadata
database. (3)Web services components, which are used
to deal with heterogeneous data, are deployed on the
server in different network nodes. (4)Users can query
metadata from web-based metadata querying system
in the portal site. (5)The user who has got permission
from certification center can send services request and
call services from different network nodes. (6)
Downloading data. Specific business process diagram
is shown in Figure 4.

International Journal of Remote Sensing Applications Vol. 2 Iss. 4, December 2012

As a result, based on the authors more than 2 years

practice on Water Project, it is successful to design and
implementation on the sharing platform. Currently
main functions of sharing platform have implemented.
The main page of platform is shown as Figure 6.

FIGURE 6 MAIN PAGE OF PLATFORM (THE LANGUAGE OF

PLATFORM IS CHINESE)

Conclusions

FIGURE 4 BUSINESS PROCESS DIAGRAM

The development framework of this platform uses

GMVC (Grid Model-View-Controller) model, which is
similar to MVC (Model-View-Controller) model [13].
Its basic structure is shown in Figure 5: (1) System
receives customers service requests through the view
grid interface. (2) View service sends the requests to
controller grid, which will determine if the requests
require data services. 3If needed then the controller
grid will send data service request to model grid. (4)
The result will be return to view grid.
All components are virtualized and all services have a
unified interface in the grid environment, thus it is
easier to construct a new service.

As the worldly rapid development and trend of

information technology in 21st century which is the
information-based
age,
water
environmental
management is inevitable gradually entering this age.
In order to make the relevant departments giving
accurate judgments and predictions, it is necessary to
build the water environmental information sharing
platform. On the one hand it can contribute to dynamic
administration of water environmental data,
standardizing the procedure of water environmental
datas collection, transport, sharing and exchange, so as
to ensure the punctuality, integrity and accuracy of the
data; On the other hand, it can make the unified
sharing platform of water environmental data come
into being.
This platform is being well applied in city planning,
land and resource management, infrastructure
construction, public services and other areas, but
construction of water environmental data sharing
platform is a long-term process. In the future,
point-to-point based data exchange will be involved
into this platform, which is our further research work.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

FIGURE 5 GMVC MODEL STRUCTURE

Supported by National Major Technological Project of

China-The Water Project (No. 2009ZX07528-004-002-03)
and Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of
Education of China (No. 20091108110003)

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International Journal of Remote Sensing Applications Vol. 2 Iss. 4, December 2012

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