Seeing the forest through the trees: A review of integrated environmental modelling tools

What's going on about geo-process modeling in virtual geographic environments (VGEs)

“…Due to an increasing number of applications of extensive models to support integrated modeling, model sharing and reusability are considered with valuable development in technologies (Granell et al, 2013b). As an additional step from the archives of model codes (Rollins et al, 2014), the model base, which considers geographic interactions and knowledge, becomes an important component in a modeling system to improve model reusability.…”

“…Service-oriented architectures (SOA), which are defined as "open and interoperable environments based on reusability and standardized components and services", are utilized to develop collaborative and distributed web applications (Granell et al, 2013a). Resourceoriented modeling aims to simplify the access and reuse of pieces of functionality in integrated modeling and highlights the importance of uniform interfaces for enhancing integration of multi-disciplinary resources at any granularity level (Granell et al, 2013b;Jakeman et al, 2006). The flexibility of model reusability and the development from component-based modeling to resourcebased modeling is approved in the domain of information science.…”

“…For instance, five scenarios are employed to quantify various existing and proposed land use measures, best management practices, and combinations of these items (Randhir and Raposa, 2014). Fortunately, with the model base, integrated modeling solutions, including input data, model parameterization, and simulation output, can be conveniently traced and reused to address existing interconnected natural and social challenges (Granell et al, 2013b). Fig.…”

Big Data breaking barriers - first steps on a long trail

“…With a more integrative view on Digital Earth platforms, and following our earlier work on the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) (Schade, 2013), integrated modelling (Granell et al, 2013), as well as a Digital Earth Nervous System (De Longueville et al, 2010), the concept of the Observation Web (Havlik et al, 2011) we continued our investigations of integration mechanisms across multiple types of data sources. (Ostländer et al, submitted).…”

Developing dynamic virtual geographic environments (VGEs) for geographic research

“…Accordingly, modern geographic research has moved towards integration and a comprehensive perspective on the world, which requires experts from different domains to work collaboratively while not keep their head down. Because of this aspect, on one hand, web-based virtual worlds provide a favorable natural advantage for users to communicate within a same environment; on the other hand, some virtual research environments (VREs) have also supported generic research tasks such as data management (horizontal view) as well as allowing scientists to use their tools and technologies within their particular disciplines (vertical view) (Voss and Procter 2009;Granell et al 2013). Indeed, there is an urgent need to merge these two types of systems so as to facilitate collaboration based on common cognition .…”