Geographic information system of Mt Everest area: the data base structure

The assessment of natural, cultural and human resources, in the context of the growing importance of environmental studies, creates a large amount of multidisciplinary data. This should be integrated and analysed so as to evaluate and manage the resources, as well as to model their internal and external relationships. Nowadays the necessity of handling, integrating, analysing and updating data is well supported by the use of the Geographic Information System (GIS), which offers hardware and software tools expressly designed for these tasks. In the framework of the Italian Ev-K2-CNR Project (High Mountain Scientific and Technological Research) a Geographic Information System (GIS) has been planned to model the effects of the interactions between meteoric waters and soils (geochemical characteristics, morphology, vegetation cover, and so on). The study area is centred in the Khumbu Valley, at the foot of Mt Everest in the Nepalese Himalayas, where, at an altitude of 5050 m a.s.l., a "Pyramid" of glass and aluminium has been constructed to host scientific laboratories and researchers. The aim of the project is to create a GIS of the area which is as simple as possible, so that the final product may be widely disseminated without the obstacles of excessive costs or size of the software/hardware tools employed. The GIS will be organised with different layers containing geographical, geological, biogeochemical and hydrological information of the area, collected from the available cartography, enhanced remotely sensed imagery and in situ field studies. In the near future, a simple GIS, which will have to store and handle increasingly large and complex amounts of data, will not be able to offer the expected results. To overcome this probable obstacle, the GIS will be backed by a Decision Support System (DSS), modelled as a knowledge-based system supporting decision-making activities. The DSS will be structured as a general and flexible set of software tools able to present all the intermediate reasoning steps from data interpretation to formulation of judgements in such a way as to explain subjective decisions and the salient intermediate interpretative results.