Dear all,

The Earth and Space Science Informatics Laboratory (ESSI-Lab) of the CNR-IIA (Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research of the National Research Council of Italy) was established to facilitate the effective and seamless provision of multi-disciplinary Earth and Space resources to Information Society applications. ESSI-Lab research focuses on the application of information science and technologies to manage, harmonize, and share Earth and Space Science resources and develop Spatial Information Infrastructures.

In the context of the FP6 European project CYCLOPS ended in 2008 the ESSI-Lab (jointly with INFN and CIMA Foundation), developed a prototype of a wildfire risk assessment application running on top of the EGEE grid infrastructure. CYCLOPS (CYberinfrastructure for CiviL protection Operative ProcedureS) was a Specific Support Action of the EGEE Project, aiming to bridge the gap between the GMES and Grid communities, with particular reference to Civil Protection applications. In the context of the project, the RISICO (RISchio Incendi e COordinamento) application adopted by the Italian Civil Protection for wildfire risk assessment was ported on top of the gLite middleware. The general approach was based on the creation of an intermediate layer of grid-enabled OGC web services above the grid infrastructure to address geospatial interoperability while taking advantage of grid scalability. The resulting prototype of a Grid-enabled version of RISICO (G-RISICO) demonstrated flexibility (by using standard web services for data and model access) and scalability (through grid elastic computing) [details are available in P. Mazzetti; S. Nativi, V. Angelini, M. Verlato, P. Fiorucci, “A Grid Platform for the European Civil Protection e-Infrastructure: the Forest Fires use scenario”, Earth Science Informatics (ESIN) Journal, May 2009].

While the development was focused on the RISICO application, the architectural approach was kept generic aiming to be replicated in different application scenarios involving data access and model chaining. (For example it was successfully replicated in the enablement of G-ALHTAIR, a grid-enabled prototype of the ALHTAIR flood application used by the French Civil protection.)

Therefore we express our interest in the achievements of the DRIHM project, and we would be interested in a collaboration with the DRIHM Consortium to share our respective experiences.

Best regards,
Paolo Mazzetti