The Geospatial Emergency management NEtwork for Support by Imagery Services for year 2000 (GENESIS 2000) Project is intended to federate a number of highly relevant experiences in Europe into a common offering of geospatial information services for the territory management in near-real time, with the support of today’s telecommunication network.

The goal of GENESIS 2000 is to offer seamless
access in real time to valuable information derived from space imagery and
integrated by specific service providers.
Potential customers will be civil
protection information services.

The customer will access to these services through a standard Internet
connection, using a standard browser as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Explorer, with the possibility to obtain the same service level on a fixed
workstation or on a portable PC connected via satellite to the GENESIS 2000 server.

One point of strength of such an open approach is that the customer will be able
to get the best specialists for each specific application, and therefore build
the favourite service:

• from a choice of available content providers

• on ad-hoc high performance servers.

The ideal GENESIS 2000, sponsored by the European Commission,
Directorate-General XIII, Trans-European Telecommunications Network, distributed
framework will be open to allow national organisations to incorporate their
local detailed information (collected with ad-hoc ground sensors
infrastructures) with the EO data; hence to allow customers to increase the
added value of their current information system.

Currently, the project is going through its Feasibility & Market Validation
Phase, aimed at:

• achieving quantitative measurement of the value added provided by such a service to the operational bodies in charge of disaster management, by analysing the whole process of geospatial data retrieval with the potential customer;

• supporting actions for the actual deployment of an European service for the provision of geospatial information to support civil protection information services;

• verifying the feasibility of the service via a pilot in 3 countries.

• validating the market, to pave the way for the full exploitation of the GENESIS services.

To achieve this aim two major goals have been identified:

• the set-up of a pre-operational European service infrastructure model, based as much as possible on existing facilities and services;

• the demonstration (1) of the model ability to serve representative user communities, through significant selected hazard management application cases, and (2) of the model self-sustainability.

One of the application cases to be tested during this first period involves
Planetek Italia and Prefettura of Bari.

Prefetto of Bari has been in charge of environmental issues for the whole Puglia
region (a wider area than the ordinary competence one, that is the province of
Bari) since 1995. The central government attributed this responsibility to
Prefetto in order to overcome an emergency situation afflicting the region
coasts.

Hence Prefetto main task has been a complete renewal of the purification system
along the 100 Km coastline. At present, Prefettura is interested in documenting
the undertaken activities and monitor the coast status.

This implies detecting any harmful discharge at sea originated from one of the
following sources:

• purification system inefficiency

• illegal sewage outflow

• illegal industrial

• discharge

The integration of Earth Observation and in situ data in a GIS will allow the
deployment of a near-real time "harmful discharges" alert service enriched by
supplying more detailed information to be stored as historical documentation
into the Prefettura databases.

Co-ordinator:
Matra Systèmes et Information, Paris, France

Contractors:

Alenia Spazio, Rome, Italy

Université Louis Pasteur de Strasbourg
SERTIT, France

Faculté Universitaire des Sciences Agronomiques de Gembloux-FUSAGx, Belgique

Planetek Italia, Valenzano, Italy

European Space Agency - ESRIN, Frascati, Italy

Spot Image, Toulouse, France

Meteo France, Toulouse, France

Service Interministériel de Défense et de Protection Civile du Bas Rhin,
Strasbourg, France

Prefecture of Bari, Italy

Ministère wallon de l’Equipement et des Transports – Services d’Etudes
Hydrologiques, Namur, Belgique

Genesis 2000 is a project sponsored by the European Commission,
Directorate-General XIII, Trans-European Telecommunications Network

GENESIS project official page-