GIMMI: Geographic Information and Mathematical Models Inter-operability

GIMMI 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 in the street). This can be achieved by allowing the inter-operability via Web of Geographic Information (GI) environmental protection services physically distributed and locally managed by their own generators, by providing the proper IT structures to represent and manage temporal knowledge, and by integrating the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure state-of-the-art legacy systems for document management and report generation. The main results of GIMMI will be a 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 inter-relation of distributed databases to run mathematical models. 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.