Mobile Handling Of Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) Dataset

Erharuyi Nosakhare, David Fairbairn

School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences,
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Oil spills has been implicated as many of the most dramatic episodes of environmental pollution and degradation. Although their direct impact is generally short-lived, they can have a devastating effect on the environment. Incidents have occurred and will continue to occur, worldwide. This observation has prompted the enactment of appropriate legislation aim at environmental conservation and sustainability by central government and its agencies. Also in an effort to reconcile the conflict between environment and development processes, to minimize spill impact on environment in case of an incident, and in response to the limited specific environmental information, most petroleum operators have created environmental sensitivity index (ESI) dataset that describe specific geographies and ecosystems at risk, all this are aimed at minimization of perturbation to the environment.

Effective management and clean up of oil spill, require not only very large equipment and personnel resources, but also detail information on shore type, access points, environmentally sensitive areas and the location of all equipment. Most of this information is contained within the environmental sensitivity (ESI) datasets, which are set of data (Map) that indicate the physical, cultural, and biotic character and the sensitivity of the various ecological associations. It is does a tool for the risk analysis with regards to evaluation of environmental effect of oil spill and response to such spill incident.

However as time is of essence when responding to an oil spill in case of an incident, these set of information needed to be readily available to onsite responder in a dynamic and flexible way. This possibility of having access and interacting with up to date digital spatial and non spatial information while in the field in a very individual, dynamic and flexible way offers significant enhancement for data quality and operational efficiency and consequently reduce ecological and financial disaster. This paper proposes that mobile handling of ESI dataset will facilitate such dynamism and flexibility in the flow of data.

Mobile data handling environment vary widely, but generally offer extremely limited computing resources: screen size, colours, resolution, storage and CPU are limited compared to stationary systems. Size, weight, robustness and battery power of mobile devices account for further limiting factors. Addressing some of these drawbacks, we examine the concept of user profile for data delivery to a mobile user.

Profile for data delivery to a mobile user contains two sections: the DOMAIN section, which specifies the profile domain and the UTILITY section which specifies the utility function.

The figure attached to this paper, shows a user profile, UP, in a mobile data delivery system. D, D1, D2 denote progressively smaller subsets of data objects which are determined by UP. D is the profile domain i.e. the set of all data objects that are specified to be of interest within UP's domain specification, D1 is the profile instantiation; consisting of data object in D, that the profile manager is able to locate. D2 is the chosen data delivered, i.e. the subset of object in D1 that the profile manager chose to deliver to the mobile device on the bases of UP's utility function specification.

References