The ENVISION Environmental Portal and Services Infrastructure

The ENVISION Portal is a Web-enabled infrastructure for the discovery, annotation, and composition of environmental services. It is a tool to create Web sites dedicated to particular domain-specific scenarios such as oil spill drift modeling or landslide risk assessment. The underlying architecture based on pluggable user interface components is briefly discussed, followed by a presentation of the components resulting from the first iteration of the implementation. A walkthrough explains how to create a scenario website and populate it with the user interface components required for one specific scenario. The paper concludes with a discussion of open challenges identified during the implementation.