IWRM* in Mongolia (MoMo): Managing geodata with SHOGun and empowering the people
Paulsen, Hinrich
Hofmann, Jürgen
Bremerich, Vanessa
Mongolia is a huge country sandwiched between Russia in the North and China in the south with a particularly harsh climate. Temperatures in winter reach -40°C and the originally nomadic way of life is disappearing fast. Rich in natural resources, many stakeholders compete for water whose supply is also subject to rapid change. An ideal setting to research water related problems also affecting many other regions of the world. Currently in the 3rd three year phase the MoMo-project, funded by the Germany Ministry of Education and Research, has implemented an open source spatial data infrastructure using the SHOGun framework that utilises Spring, Hibernate, OpenLayers and GeoExt amongst others. The focus of the current phase is on capacity development so this talk is a showcase for employing open source geospatial software in a development context. Hinrich Paulsen (terrestris GmbH & Co. KG) Jürgen Hofmann (Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB)) Vanessa Bremerich (Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB))
 The next speaker is Henrik Paulsen. He will talk about integrated water resources management. Please. Thank you very much, Ari. Well, welcome everybody. My name is Henrik Paulsen. I'm from the company Terestus. And I will talk to you quickly about a project that we're doing in Mongolia. But I'm not speaking only for Terestus, but I'm also speaking for the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. And Jürgen, who's a co-author of this presentation, he's in Mongolia right now. And Vanessa is sitting over there. So any questions you might have regarding the part of IGB, please feel free to contact Vanessa afterwards. And we are not only the two of us, the two institutions, Terestus and IGB, working in Mongolia. But it's another six partners from Germany, some universities, research institutes and two businesses. And in Mongolia, obviously, we also have partners, the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geography and Geoecology, who are working with us. And shortly about Terestus, we're local heroes, we're here in Bonn. You might have heard that, too, my partner in Terestus is the chair of this conference. And we're a spinner from the University of Bonn. We have 12 people working for us. You might have met some of us running around here. And IGB is located in Berlin. So also in Germany, it's a research institute specializing in the research of freshwater biodiversity, amongst other things. And they're a big institution, 231 employees. They get a lot of funding. And they're very active in the MOMO project that initially started in 2006. But I will go into that in a minute. All right, what am I going to talk about? I'm going to talk about a project in Mongolia. And Mongolia is a fascinating country. It's about five times as large as Germany. And we're located with our research area here. And that's part of the bigger Selenge basin, which is 459,000 square kilometers, while our catchment here is only 15,000 square kilometers large. You will probably recognize Lake Baikal. And here's the Russian Mongolian border going through here. So that's approximately where we are working. Ulaanbaatar is just down here somewhere. So that's what we're talking about. Now the big question is why are we doing it and how? So the key questions are, how can a science-based integrated water resources management be set up in Mongolia, serving as a pilot region for all of Central Asia? One thing that you have to bear in mind, Mongolia is an extreme country, which means that winter begins at the end of September. And it freezes and gets down to about minus 40 degrees. And then in May, everything thaws again. And then there's a short hot summer. And then it cools down again. So it's very extreme. There are about 2.5 million Mongolians living in Mongolia. And at the same time, you have 40 million animals living there. Animals, sheep, goats, the like. You have agriculture going on. You have a lot of mining going on. And all these stakeholders there are fresh water and they're polluting the water. And so there's a big problem in combination with this very harsh climate. So this is one thing why Mongolia was chosen as a pilot region for all of Central Asia, because the water problems, they're prevalent in all of that region per se. Now the big thing is when you're researching water, it all has a spatial context. So the big other question is how do you get a geospatial, a spatial data infrastructure set up so that you can take care of all these things? And then the third big question is how do you get all the local stakeholders to provide their data, to use the data and stuff like that? So basically to give you a quick overview of what we're dealing with, the 15,000 square kilometers, it's a catchment. And it has some, the main river that flows down here. And in total, all the tributaries together with the main river, it's close to 2,000 kilometers that we're monitoring. And basically, how do we do it? We have various chemical state regarding the nutrients. So there's a lot of nitrogen being monitored. Then we have the chemical status regarding the metals that are being monitored. Then we have the physical hydrological status. You have temperature, discharge, chlorophyll, H, pH, and such values that are being monitored. And apart from the chemical and physical properties, the ecological status, of course, is a big issue. And then hydrological parameters like bank erosion, vegetation, what does that look like? That's also a big issue. And while you could see in this map that a lot of stations since 2006 were being monitored and being set up, and the Mongolian side, they also had some stations in place, but considerably less than what the research project has been doing in that region. Now the big question is, how do you arrive at an integrated water resource monitoring? So I just showed you the parameters that were being monitored. And for example, here in this case, you could look at the biological quality of fish, and you would say, well, everything's fine. So you give the green code, and you look at the physical chemical quality, and you find, wow, it's at risk, it's not good. So you color-code it red, and so on for the others. And the result, when you look at a stretch of river, and you look at the various parameter, you deal with the worst case scenario, which means even if there is one parameter green and maybe another parameter green, as soon as there's one parameter that's red, the whole stretch of river is at risk, and it gets the lowest possible level that comes out of your monitoring. Now this is what it looks like. So if you look at the catchment, the definitions can be seen here in the legend. So as you can see in the upstream regions, it's pristine waters, it's mountain regions, it's pretty okay. And as you go further downstream, the quality deteriorates, and this is basically the status of the Hara catchment at a certain point in time. Multi-parameter sensors are being used to actually determine the quality of various parameters, and it's an online system, so you get the various parameters that are monitored, and you get the graphs over time to tell you what's happening with that individual stuff. Now the big thing is how do we do it? We use as a spatial data infrastructure, we use Shagoon. Shagoon is an acronym, and it denotes spring, hibernate, open layers, and geo-XT. And those are various frameworks that we use, and we combine them to build a spatial data infrastructure that will accept all the data that's being monitored, all the maps that are being made, and so on. And then there's something that we came up with, BASICS, it's also a JavaScript library that encompasses all this and makes it all work together. And I said that we started in 2006, the project started in 2006, it's funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research, and initially they funded 18 projects, and more and more, because this project is called, is one of two projects that I've left over from the 18, and we actually got a third funding phase, so it's very special. So we've been active in this region for nine years now, and Dorestis has actually been active in the second phase, building the spatial portal based on Shagoon, and I will quickly just show you what the functionality is. So if you arrive as an anonymous user, you can't really do much, and then once you log in, you can see that you have much more functionality, you get a lot more data to actually play around with. You can have interactive graphs of the data that's being measured, you can locate pictures of riverbanks eroding, for example, stuff like that. You can annotate stuff, which means you can actually draw on the map, just the way you would on an analog map, but you can also turn that into digitized data, so that you can actually work, continue working with this data. You can style all this the way you would in any, you know, choosing different pens. You can save work states, so what we want the people to do is actually do river basin management with this. So if you have people who are involved in this, and they leave off at the end of the day, and then they come back the next day, they can save their work state, and next day they load their work state again, they continue wherever they've been working on. You can print maps, when you, you know, you just select a region, and then you print a PDF. You will even get an overview. The PDF comes out, which you can then digitally send to somebody, or you can send it to the printer, and obviously you can upload data, in this case it's a shape upload. You can also upload raster data, stuff like that. You can also download it again for use in other applications, if you want. And we have a metadata portal, in this case GeoNetwork Open Source in place, to deal with metadata, and we have user and rights administration, so that you can define who sees what, which is an important issue. And one very important thing is that in Mongolia, which is a large country, it has 29 catchments, large catchments, and you want maybe a river basin management for each one. So what you can do here is just by quickly going through these tabs here, you can actually create new WebGS instances, which are sort of in line with the catchment that you're looking at. So you can very quickly create new WebGS instances without having to program anything. So it's a very neat thing that you can actually have individual WebJSs for the catchments. Now this is what we developed in the second phase, and by the time we got the funding, time went on. And so now in the third phase, we've basically completed reprogrammed that. We're still using Shagoon, but we're using the new libraries. So it looks a bit more modern, and underneath, everything is brand new. And we have the same back-end again, so that you can actually maintain, it's hard to see, but here you can take care of your users, here you can take care of your layers, and up here you can manage the applications that you're having. And you have a new client, something I just showed you sort of in the old version, and something that's really new here and really, really cool. We have a new button up here, which is the river basin management plan, or an Atlas. And I will quickly show you what it is. Up here you can upload the PDFs, and it's any PDFs. So the maps you can get out of the portal, you can upload them here as a PDF, and you can also upload a PDF, which can be text that you've written regarding the management plan that you have, or if you want an Atlas, or if you want to document your, the literature that's relevant, and so on, or the laws for that matter, you can all put it in here, and you can easily rename documents. If you get an update, you just replace the old one with the new one, and you can also interactively drag the document to a different location. And once you press on the upper most tab, then all these individual PDFs, that can be one page, can be five pages, 100 pages, they all get put into one big document, which you can then download or make accessible to whomever, so that they can look at the management plan or the Atlas. So another big question is, how do you get people to cooperate? We're here in Germany, the Mugolins, they're several hours away and a few thousand kilometers, so what we use is we use GitHub, everybody know GitHub, it's a collaboration platform on the internet, so that's where you can put your code, where you can put your documentation, stuff like that, so when we change things on GitHub, the Mongolian side can actually see it, and vice versa, and that saves us setting open office documents or emails around with the changes that we're doing, it's all documented, it's out in the open, and it's actually there for everybody, so if you're interested in this, the source code is there, you can download it, you can do stuff with it, and you can obviously also contribute if you feel like doing so, and it's an easy thing to see, you can open up issues, you can issue pull requests, things like that, and you can manage a whole project using GitHub, and it also gives you an overview of the issues that are open, so it's perfect for this collaboration over long distances, not only over long distances, we at Terrestres we also use it for our internal projects that we're programming, so it's just great for that. Now the other big thing is that you need to find people who are willing and able to cooperate and to collaborate, so we found the Institute of Meteorology and Environmental Studies and Information in Mongolia, and they were very interested because they have a lot of geodatabases already up and in place, so they have a lot of data, and they have quite a bit of knowledge that we're also employing in the MoMo project, so we got them to actually participate, and it's working quite well, so we've been spending the past year reprogramming the Geoportal and doing stuff, and at the same time we've been doing capacity development, so we were on Skype, we were doing hangouts with the Mongolian side, first of all teaching them about the GitHub platform because that was new to them, but they saw that this was the way to go, and yes it's been going rather well, and in February of this year we did a five day workshop with their technical people, and we showed them Shagun, we showed them the old portal, and the new developments that we're doing there, and this is an image of the workshop that was going on in Ulaanbaatar, and this is another group picture, so basically this is how we have been dealing with the integrated water resources management project in Mongolia, and the technical setup that we've been using to actually work together with them, and it looks quite promising that we will reach our tasks of actually doing or setting up water resources management that can be used by the Mongolian side after our project finishes, and we leave and we're not there anymore, since all the software components that we're using since they're open source were legally allowed to transfer the whole system to the Mongolian side, so with the aid of the capacity development that we're doing, we're very hopeful that it will turn out well, and that they can then help themselves with all the research and all the data that's been going on for the past nine to ten years. All right, so this is my conclusion, the geodata is there, the Mongolians are there, who are able to help along with the whole project, and it's very important to find the right Mongolian partners, which I think we have done, so we're very happy about that, and yes, the portal is being developed on the internet, and yeah, it's there for everybody to use, and on our own behalf, we're doing cool stuff in Mongolia, but not only there, so if there are any developers around who feel like joining Tracist, then please apply, and yes, I'll finish on that note, and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, do you have questions? At the job portal, we can access in Mongolian language, is that possible? Yes, it has been translated, so you can access it in Mongolian language. Other questions? Do you have any feedback on how much do they use in the management from the governmental point of view? I mean, what is the impact of all this development in the policy making and management of the resources? The impact is quite large because Mongolia is realizing that they have scarce water resources, and it's highly variable. It's being researched whether it's climate change, human impact, all these things, so they are actually in the process of realizing that they have to do something, and the cooperation with the Mongolian side is very good because they're profiting from the German scientists and other scientists who are working in this field. They've adopted the European water directive to a certain extent to their needs, so yes, the impact is there, but they're still struggling to get all these river basin management plans set up for each individual catchment, so they still have work to do in that field. But we hope through the architecture that we've chosen and the ease of actually supplying all the catchments with an information system that this will help them to actually manage their water resources better. Other questions? I have a question or just a wish to you. I missed the libraries that you are using, you had a slide about those, can you take it and take that back? You were using at least the EXT JavaScript. We were using Spring, Hibernate. Spring is a security module, a framework for security. Hibernate is basically a database abstraction layer, so we have open layers as the client, and so the client doesn't directly speak with the database post-js. We use Hibernate, and then GOOXT is an ex-js enhanced library for spatial stuff. Yes, I know. I've been using the GOOXT. What is your experience with it? It was a bit stalled for a while, I think, and then it's got the... Yes, we took it over. We took over GOOXT. So we now have the server, and we're now kind of... With the maintainers. With the maintainers. With the maintainers, currently of GOOXT. The problem with GOOXT is currently that the ex-js license is a bit problematic. So... Is it dual license? Yes, it's a dual license, but they're changing it, and they're changing it so that not everybody's happy with the license. So GOOXT is a wonderful library, and you can get very good results very fast. So the only problem with this is the license. The technology is perfect. So our experience is very good with GOOXT, especially in combination with open layers. I mean, this is what it is, merging open layers with ex-js. So this is why we have GOOXT. Yeah, okay, one more. Thank you. Seeing on that, I don't know why a database of a station layer like Hibernate is required, what is the advantage of having it? Why you needed this? It is so that you can exchange the databases without having to reprogram the whole application. If you use a database abstraction layer, you can say start off with Oracle. A lot of people have Oracle. And if they want to merge to say post-js or PostgreSQL, it's very easy to do because you can sort of pull out the database underneath. You put in a new database, but all the requests, they get translated by Hibernate. So this is the advantage of having this abstraction layer in between. And I mean, there are any number of other databases. I've just mentioned Oracle, but there's MSSQL and whatever else. So Hibernate will actually allow you to actually switch from database to database. And since we want to reuse these applications, and then somebody says, okay, I don't have Post-js, I have something else, it's no big problem for us because we have this abstraction layer in there. Okay, thank you once again. Well, thank you.
 The next speaker is Henrik Paulsen.  He will talk about integrated water resources management.  Please.  Thank you very much, Ari.  Well, welcome everybody.  My name is Henrik Paulsen.  I'm from the company Terestus.  And I will talk to you quickly about a project that we're doing in Mongolia.  But I'm not speaking only for Terestus, but I'm also speaking for the Leibniz Institute  of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries.  And Jürgen, who's a co-author of this presentation, he's in Mongolia right now.  And Vanessa is sitting over there.  So any questions you might have regarding the part of IGB, please feel free to contact  Vanessa afterwards.  And we are not only the two of us, the two institutions, Terestus and IGB, working in  Mongolia.  But it's another six partners from Germany, some universities, research institutes and  two businesses.  And in Mongolia, obviously, we also have partners, the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and the  Institute of Geography and Geoecology, who are working with us.  And shortly about Terestus, we're local heroes, we're here in Bonn.  You might have heard that, too, my partner in Terestus is the chair of this conference.  And we're a spinner from the University of Bonn.  We have 12 people working for us.  You might have met some of us running around here.  And IGB is located in Berlin.  So also in Germany, it's a research institute specializing in the research of freshwater  biodiversity, amongst other things.  And they're a big institution, 231 employees.  They get a lot of funding.  And they're very active in the MOMO project that initially started in 2006.  But I will go into that in a minute.  All right, what am I going to talk about?  I'm going to talk about a project in Mongolia.  And Mongolia is a fascinating country.  It's about five times as large as Germany.  And we're located with our research area here.  And that's part of the bigger Selenge basin, which is 459,000 square kilometers, while  our catchment here is only 15,000 square kilometers large.  You will probably recognize Lake Baikal.  And here's the Russian Mongolian border going through here.  So that's approximately where we are working.  Ulaanbaatar is just down here somewhere.  So that's what we're talking about.  Now the big question is why are we doing it and how?  So the key questions are, how can a science-based integrated water resources management be set  up in Mongolia, serving as a pilot region for all of Central Asia?  One thing that you have to bear in mind, Mongolia is an extreme country, which means  that winter begins at the end of September.  And it freezes and gets down to about minus 40 degrees.  And then in May, everything thaws again.  And then there's a short hot summer.  And then it cools down again.  So it's very extreme.  There are about 2.5 million Mongolians living in Mongolia.  And at the same time, you have 40 million animals living there.  Animals, sheep, goats, the like.  You have agriculture going on.  You have a lot of mining going on.  And all these stakeholders there are fresh water and they're polluting the water.  And so there's a big problem in combination with this very harsh climate.  So this is one thing why Mongolia was chosen as a pilot region for all of Central Asia,  because the water problems, they're prevalent in all of that region per se.  Now the big thing is when you're researching water, it all has a spatial context.  So the big other question is how do you get a geospatial, a spatial data infrastructure  set up so that you can take care of all these things?  And then the third big question is how do you get all the local stakeholders to provide  their data, to use the data and stuff like that?  So basically to give you a quick overview of what we're dealing with, the 15,000 square  kilometers, it's a catchment.  And it has some, the main river that flows down here.  And in total, all the tributaries together with the main river, it's close to 2,000 kilometers  that we're monitoring.  And basically, how do we do it?  We have various chemical state regarding the nutrients.  So there's a lot of nitrogen being monitored.  Then we have the chemical status regarding the metals that are being monitored.  Then we have the physical hydrological status.  You have temperature, discharge, chlorophyll, H, pH, and such values that are being monitored.  And apart from the chemical and physical properties, the ecological status, of course, is a big  issue.  And then hydrological parameters like bank erosion, vegetation, what does that look like?  That's also a big issue.  And while you could see in this map that a lot of stations since 2006 were being monitored  and being set up, and the Mongolian side, they also had some stations in place, but considerably  less than what the research project has been doing in that region.  Now the big question is, how do you arrive at an integrated water resource monitoring?  So I just showed you the parameters that were being monitored.  And for example, here in this case, you could look at the biological quality of fish, and  you would say, well, everything's fine.  So you give the green code, and you look at the physical chemical quality, and you find,  wow, it's at risk, it's not good.  So you color-code it red, and so on for the others.  And the result, when you look at a stretch of river, and you look at the various parameter,  you deal with the worst case scenario, which means even if there is one parameter green  and maybe another parameter green, as soon as there's one parameter that's red, the whole  stretch of river is at risk, and it gets the lowest possible level that comes out of your  monitoring.  Now this is what it looks like.  So if you look at the catchment, the definitions can be seen here in the legend.  So as you can see in the upstream regions, it's pristine waters, it's mountain regions,  it's pretty okay.  And as you go further downstream, the quality deteriorates, and this is basically the status  of the Hara catchment at a certain point in time.  Multi-parameter sensors are being used to actually determine the quality of various parameters,  and it's an online system, so you get the various parameters that are monitored, and  you get the graphs over time to tell you what's happening with that individual stuff.  Now the big thing is how do we do it?  We use as a spatial data infrastructure, we use Shagoon.  Shagoon is an acronym, and it denotes spring, hibernate, open layers, and geo-XT.  And those are various frameworks that we use, and we combine them to build a spatial data  infrastructure that will accept all the data that's being monitored, all the maps that are  being made, and so on.  And then there's something that we came up with, BASICS, it's also a JavaScript library  that encompasses all this and makes it all work together.  And I said that we started in 2006, the project started in 2006, it's funded by the German  Ministry of Education and Research, and initially they funded 18 projects, and more and more,  because this project is called, is one of two projects that I've left over from the  18, and we actually got a third funding phase, so it's very special.  So we've been active in this region for nine years now, and Dorestis has actually been  active in the second phase, building the spatial portal based on Shagoon, and I will quickly  just show you what the functionality is.  So if you arrive as an anonymous user, you can't really do much, and then once you log  in, you can see that you have much more functionality, you get a lot more data to actually play around  with.  You can have interactive graphs of the data that's being measured, you can locate pictures  of riverbanks eroding, for example, stuff like that.  You can annotate stuff, which means you can actually draw on the map, just the way you  would on an analog map, but you can also turn that into digitized data, so that you can  actually work, continue working with this data.  You can style all this the way you would in any, you know, choosing different pens.  You can save work states, so what we want the people to do is actually do river basin  management with this.  So if you have people who are involved in this, and they leave off at the end of the  day, and then they come back the next day, they can save their work state, and next day  they load their work state again, they continue wherever they've been working on.  You can print maps, when you, you know, you just select a region, and then you print a  PDF.  You will even get an overview.  The PDF comes out, which you can then digitally send to somebody, or you can send it to the  printer, and obviously you can upload data, in this case it's a shape upload.  You can also upload raster data, stuff like that.  You can also download it again for use in other applications, if you want.  And we have a metadata portal, in this case GeoNetwork Open Source in place, to deal with  metadata, and we have user and rights administration, so that you can define who sees what, which  is an important issue.  And one very important thing is that in Mongolia, which is a large country, it has 29 catchments,  large catchments, and you want maybe a river basin management for each one.  So what you can do here is just by quickly going through these tabs here, you can actually  create new WebGS instances, which are sort of in line with the catchment that you're  looking at.  So you can very quickly create new WebGS instances without having to program anything.  So it's a very neat thing that you can actually have individual WebJSs for the catchments.  Now this is what we developed in the second phase, and by the time we got the funding,  time went on.  And so now in the third phase, we've basically completed reprogrammed that.  We're still using Shagoon, but we're using the new libraries.  So it looks a bit more modern, and underneath, everything is brand new.  And we have the same back-end again, so that you can actually maintain, it's hard to see,  but here you can take care of your users, here you can take care of your layers, and  up here you can manage the applications that you're having.  And you have a new client, something I just showed you sort of in the old version, and  something that's really new here and really, really cool.  We have a new button up here, which is the river basin management plan, or an Atlas.  And I will quickly show you what it is.  Up here you can upload the PDFs, and it's any PDFs.  So the maps you can get out of the portal, you can upload them here as a PDF, and you  can also upload a PDF, which can be text that you've written regarding the management plan  that you have, or if you want an Atlas, or if you want to document your, the literature  that's relevant, and so on, or the laws for that matter, you can all put it in here, and  you can easily rename documents.  If you get an update, you just replace the old one with the new one, and you can also  interactively drag the document to a different location.  And once you press on the upper most tab, then all these individual PDFs, that can be  one page, can be five pages, 100 pages, they all get put into one big document, which you  can then download or make accessible to whomever, so that they can look at the management plan  or the Atlas.  So another big question is, how do you get people to cooperate?  We're here in Germany, the Mugolins, they're several hours away and a few thousand kilometers,  so what we use is we use GitHub, everybody know GitHub, it's a collaboration platform  on the internet, so that's where you can put your code, where you can put your documentation,  stuff like that, so when we change things on GitHub, the Mongolian side can actually  see it, and vice versa, and that saves us setting open office documents or emails around  with the changes that we're doing, it's all documented, it's out in the open, and it's  actually there for everybody, so if you're interested in this, the source code is there,  you can download it, you can do stuff with it, and you can obviously also contribute  if you feel like doing so, and it's an easy thing to see, you can open up issues, you  can issue pull requests, things like that, and you can manage a whole project using  GitHub, and it also gives you an overview of the issues that are open, so it's perfect  for this collaboration over long distances, not only over long distances, we at Terrestres  we also use it for our internal projects that we're programming, so it's just great  for that.  Now the other big thing is that you need to find people who are willing and able to cooperate  and to collaborate, so we found the Institute of Meteorology and Environmental Studies and  Information in Mongolia, and they were very interested because they have a lot of geodatabases  already up and in place, so they have a lot of data, and they have quite a bit of knowledge  that we're also employing in the MoMo project, so we got them to actually participate, and  it's working quite well, so we've been spending the past year reprogramming the Geoportal  and doing stuff, and at the same time we've been doing capacity development, so we were  on Skype, we were doing hangouts with the Mongolian side, first of all teaching them  about the GitHub platform because that was new to them, but they saw that this was the  way to go, and yes it's been going rather well, and in February of this year we did a  five day workshop with their technical people, and we showed them Shagun, we showed them  the old portal, and the new developments that we're doing there, and this is an image of  the workshop that was going on in Ulaanbaatar, and this is another group picture, so basically  this is how we have been dealing with the integrated water resources management project  in Mongolia, and the technical setup that we've been using to actually work together  with them, and it looks quite promising that we will reach our tasks of actually doing  or setting up water resources management that can be used by the Mongolian side after our  project finishes, and we leave and we're not there anymore, since all the software components  that we're using since they're open source were legally allowed to transfer the whole  system to the Mongolian side, so with the aid of the capacity development that we're  doing, we're very hopeful that it will turn out well, and that they can then help themselves  with all the research and all the data that's been going on for the past nine to ten years.  All right, so this is my conclusion, the geodata is there, the Mongolians are there, who are  able to help along with the whole project, and it's very important to find the right  Mongolian partners, which I think we have done, so we're very happy about that, and yes, the  portal is being developed on the internet, and yeah, it's there for everybody to use,  and on our own behalf, we're doing cool stuff in Mongolia, but not only there, so if there  are any developers around who feel like joining Tracist, then please apply, and yes, I'll  finish on that note, and thank you very much for your attention.  Thank you, do you have questions?  At the job portal, we can access in Mongolian language, is that possible?  Yes, it has been translated, so you can access it in Mongolian language.  Other questions?  Do you have any feedback on how much do they use in the management from the governmental  point of view?  I mean, what is the impact of all this development in the policy making and management of the  resources?  The impact is quite large because Mongolia is realizing that they have scarce water resources,  and it's highly variable.  It's being researched whether it's climate change, human impact, all these things, so  they are actually in the process of realizing that they have to do something, and the cooperation  with the Mongolian side is very good because they're profiting from the German scientists  and other scientists who are working in this field.  They've adopted the European water directive to a certain extent to their needs, so yes,  the impact is there, but they're still struggling to get all these river basin management plans  set up for each individual catchment, so they still have work to do in that field.  But we hope through the architecture that we've chosen and the ease of actually supplying  all the catchments with an information system that this will help them to actually manage  their water resources better.  Other questions?  I have a question or just a wish to you.  I missed the libraries that you are using, you had a slide about those, can you take  it and take that back?  You were using at least the EXT JavaScript.  We were using Spring, Hibernate.  Spring is a security module, a framework for security.  Hibernate is basically a database abstraction layer, so we have open layers as the client,  and so the client doesn't directly speak with the database post-js.  We use Hibernate, and then GOOXT is an ex-js enhanced library for spatial stuff.  Yes, I know.  I've been using the GOOXT.  What is your experience with it?  It was a bit stalled for a while, I think, and then it's got the...  Yes, we took it over.  We took over GOOXT.  So we now have the server, and we're now kind of...  With the maintainers.  With the maintainers.  With the maintainers, currently of GOOXT.  The problem with GOOXT is currently that the ex-js license is a bit problematic.  So...  Is it dual license?  Yes, it's a dual license, but they're changing it, and they're changing it so that not everybody's  happy with the license.  So GOOXT is a wonderful library, and you can get very good results very fast.  So the only problem with this is the license.  The technology is perfect.  So our experience is very good with GOOXT, especially in combination with open layers.  I mean, this is what it is, merging open layers with ex-js.  So this is why we have GOOXT.  Yeah, okay, one more.  Thank you.  Seeing on that, I don't know why a database of a station layer like Hibernate is required,  what is the advantage of having it?  Why you needed this?  It is so that you can exchange the databases without having to reprogram the whole application.  If you use a database abstraction layer, you can say start off with Oracle.  A lot of people have Oracle.  And if they want to merge to say post-js or PostgreSQL, it's very easy to do because  you can sort of pull out the database underneath.  You put in a new database, but all the requests, they get translated by Hibernate.  So this is the advantage of having this abstraction layer in between.  And I mean, there are any number of other databases.  I've just mentioned Oracle, but there's MSSQL and whatever else.  So Hibernate will actually allow you to actually switch from database to database.  And since we want to reuse these applications, and then somebody says, okay, I don't have  Post-js, I have something else, it's no big problem for us because we have this abstraction  layer in there.  Okay, thank you once again.  Well, thank you.
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The next speaker is Henrik Paulsen. He will talk about integrated water resources management. Please. Thank you very much, Ari. Well, welcome everybody. My name is Henrik Paulsen. I'm from the company Terestus. And I will talk to you quickly about a project that we're doing in Mongolia. But I'm not speaking only for Terestus, but I'm also speaking for the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. And Jürgen, who's a co-author of this presentation, he's in Mongolia right now. And Vanessa is sitting over there. So any questions you might have regarding the part of IGB, please feel free to contact Vanessa afterwards. And we are not only the two of us, the two institutions, Terestus and IGB, working in Mongolia. But it's another six partners from Germany, some universities, research institutes and two businesses. And in Mongolia, obviously, we also have partners, the Mongolian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Geography and Geoecology, who are working with us. And shortly about Terestus, we're local heroes, we're here in Bonn. You might have heard that, too, my partner in Terestus is the chair of this conference. And we're a spinner from the University of Bonn. We have 12 people working for us. You might have met some of us running around here. And IGB is located in Berlin. So also in Germany, it's a research institute specializing in the research of freshwater biodiversity, amongst other things. And they're a big institution, 231 employees. They get a lot of funding. And they're very active in the MOMO project that initially started in 2006. But I will go into that in a minute. All right, what am I going to talk about? I'm going to talk about a project in Mongolia. And Mongolia is a fascinating country. It's about five times as large as Germany. And we're located with our research area here. And that's part of the bigger Selenge basin, which is 459,000 square kilometers, while our catchment here is only 15,000 square kilometers large. You will probably recognize Lake Baikal. And here's the Russian Mongolian border going through here. So that's approximately where we are working. Ulaanbaatar is just down here somewhere. So that's what we're talking about. Now the big question is why are we doing it and how? So the key questions are, how can a science-based integrated water resources management be set up in Mongolia, serving as a pilot region for all of Central Asia? One thing that you have to bear in mind, Mongolia is an extreme country, which means that winter begins at the end of September. And it freezes and gets down to about minus 40 degrees. And then in May, everything thaws again. And then there's a short hot summer. And then it cools down again. So it's very extreme. There are about 2.5 million Mongolians living in Mongolia. And at the same time, you have 40 million animals living there. Animals, sheep, goats, the like. You have agriculture going on. You have a lot of mining going on. And all these stakeholders there are fresh water and they're polluting the water. And so there's a big problem in combination with this very harsh climate. So this is one thing why Mongolia was chosen as a pilot region for all of Central Asia, because the water problems, they're prevalent in all of that region per se. Now the big thing is when you're researching water, it all has a spatial context. So the big other question is how do you get a geospatial, a spatial data infrastructure set up so that you can take care of all these things? And then the third big question is how do you get all the local stakeholders to provide their data, to use the data and stuff like that? So basically to give you a quick overview of what we're dealing with, the 15,000 square kilometers, it's a catchment. And it has some, the main river that flows down here. And in total, all the tributaries together with the main river, it's close to 2,000 kilometers that we're monitoring. And basically, how do we do it? We have various chemical state regarding the nutrients. So there's a lot of nitrogen being monitored. Then we have the chemical status regarding the metals that are being monitored. Then we have the physical hydrological status. You have temperature, discharge, chlorophyll, H, pH, and such values that are being monitored. And apart from the chemical and physical properties, the ecological status, of course, is a big issue. And then hydrological parameters like bank erosion, vegetation, what does that look like? That's also a big issue. And while you could see in this map that a lot of stations since 2006 were being monitored and being set up, and the Mongolian side, they also had some stations in place, but considerably less than what the research project has been doing in that region. Now the big question is, how do you arrive at an integrated water resource monitoring? So I just showed you the parameters that were being monitored. And for example, here in this case, you could look at the biological quality of fish, and you would say, well, everything's fine. So you give the green code, and you look at the physical chemical quality, and you find, wow, it's at risk, it's not good. So you color-code it red, and so on for the others. And the result, when you look at a stretch of river, and you look at the various parameter, you deal with the worst case scenario, which means even if there is one parameter green and maybe another parameter green, as soon as there's one parameter that's red, the whole stretch of river is at risk, and it gets the lowest possible level that comes out of your monitoring. Now this is what it looks like. So if you look at the catchment, the definitions can be seen here in the legend. So as you can see in the upstream regions, it's pristine waters, it's mountain regions, it's pretty okay. And as you go further downstream, the quality deteriorates, and this is basically the status of the Hara catchment at a certain point in time. Multi-parameter sensors are being used to actually determine the quality of various parameters, and it's an online system, so you get the various parameters that are monitored, and you get the graphs over time to tell you what's happening with that individual stuff. Now the big thing is how do we do it? We use as a spatial data infrastructure, we use Shagoon. Shagoon is an acronym, and it denotes spring, hibernate, open layers, and geo-XT. And those are various frameworks that we use, and we combine them to build a spatial data infrastructure that will accept all the data that's being monitored, all the maps that are being made, and so on. And then there's something that we came up with, BASICS, it's also a JavaScript library that encompasses all this and makes it all work together. And I said that we started in 2006, the project started in 2006, it's funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research, and initially they funded 18 projects, and more and more, because this project is called, is one of two projects that I've left over from the 18, and we actually got a third funding phase, so it's very special. So we've been active in this region for nine years now, and Dorestis has actually been active in the second phase, building the spatial portal based on Shagoon, and I will quickly just show you what the functionality is. So if you arrive as an anonymous user, you can't really do much, and then once you log in, you can see that you have much more functionality, you get a lot more data to actually play around with. You can have interactive graphs of the data that's being measured, you can locate pictures of riverbanks eroding, for example, stuff like that. You can annotate stuff, which means you can actually draw on the map, just the way you would on an analog map, but you can also turn that into digitized data, so that you can actually work, continue working with this data. You can style all this the way you would in any, you know, choosing different pens. You can save work states, so what we want the people to do is actually do river basin management with this. So if you have people who are involved in this, and they leave off at the end of the day, and then they come back the next day, they can save their work state, and next day they load their work state again, they continue wherever they've been working on. You can print maps, when you, you know, you just select a region, and then you print a PDF. You will even get an overview. The PDF comes out, which you can then digitally send to somebody, or you can send it to the printer, and obviously you can upload data, in this case it's a shape upload. You can also upload raster data, stuff like that. You can also download it again for use in other applications, if you want. And we have a metadata portal, in this case GeoNetwork Open Source in place, to deal with metadata, and we have user and rights administration, so that you can define who sees what, which is an important issue. And one very important thing is that in Mongolia, which is a large country, it has 29 catchments, large catchments, and you want maybe a river basin management for each one. So what you can do here is just by quickly going through these tabs here, you can actually create new WebGS instances, which are sort of in line with the catchment that you're looking at. So you can very quickly create new WebGS instances without having to program anything. So it's a very neat thing that you can actually have individual WebJSs for the catchments. Now this is what we developed in the second phase, and by the time we got the funding, time went on. And so now in the third phase, we've basically completed reprogrammed that. We're still using Shagoon, but we're using the new libraries. So it looks a bit more modern, and underneath, everything is brand new. And we have the same back-end again, so that you can actually maintain, it's hard to see, but here you can take care of your users, here you can take care of your layers, and up here you can manage the applications that you're having. And you have a new client, something I just showed you sort of in the old version, and something that's really new here and really, really cool. We have a new button up here, which is the river basin management plan, or an Atlas. And I will quickly show you what it is. Up here you can upload the PDFs, and it's any PDFs. So the maps you can get out of the portal, you can upload them here as a PDF, and you can also upload a PDF, which can be text that you've written regarding the management plan that you have, or if you want an Atlas, or if you want to document your, the literature that's relevant, and so on, or the laws for that matter, you can all put it in here, and you can easily rename documents. If you get an update, you just replace the old one with the new one, and you can also interactively drag the document to a different location. And once you press on the upper most tab, then all these individual PDFs, that can be one page, can be five pages, 100 pages, they all get put into one big document, which you can then download or make accessible to whomever, so that they can look at the management plan or the Atlas. So another big question is, how do you get people to cooperate? We're here in Germany, the Mugolins, they're several hours away and a few thousand kilometers, so what we use is we use GitHub, everybody know GitHub, it's a collaboration platform on the internet, so that's where you can put your code, where you can put your documentation, stuff like that, so when we change things on GitHub, the Mongolian side can actually see it, and vice versa, and that saves us setting open office documents or emails around with the changes that we're doing, it's all documented, it's out in the open, and it's actually there for everybody, so if you're interested in this, the source code is there, you can download it, you can do stuff with it, and you can obviously also contribute if you feel like doing so, and it's an easy thing to see, you can open up issues, you can issue pull requests, things like that, and you can manage a whole project using GitHub, and it also gives you an overview of the issues that are open, so it's perfect for this collaboration over long distances, not only over long distances, we at Terrestres we also use it for our internal projects that we're programming, so it's just great for that. Now the other big thing is that you need to find people who are willing and able to cooperate and to collaborate, so we found the Institute of Meteorology and Environmental Studies and Information in Mongolia, and they were very interested because they have a lot of geodatabases already up and in place, so they have a lot of data, and they have quite a bit of knowledge that we're also employing in the MoMo project, so we got them to actually participate, and it's working quite well, so we've been spending the past year reprogramming the Geoportal and doing stuff, and at the same time we've been doing capacity development, so we were on Skype, we were doing hangouts with the Mongolian side, first of all teaching them about the GitHub platform because that was new to them, but they saw that this was the way to go, and yes it's been going rather well, and in February of this year we did a five day workshop with their technical people, and we showed them Shagun, we showed them the old portal, and the new developments that we're doing there, and this is an image of the workshop that was going on in Ulaanbaatar, and this is another group picture, so basically this is how we have been dealing with the integrated water resources management project in Mongolia, and the technical setup that we've been using to actually work together with them, and it looks quite promising that we will reach our tasks of actually doing or setting up water resources management that can be used by the Mongolian side after our project finishes, and we leave and we're not there anymore, since all the software components that we're using since they're open source were legally allowed to transfer the whole system to the Mongolian side, so with the aid of the capacity development that we're doing, we're very hopeful that it will turn out well, and that they can then help themselves with all the research and all the data that's been going on for the past nine to ten years. All right, so this is my conclusion, the geodata is there, the Mongolians are there, who are able to help along with the whole project, and it's very important to find the right Mongolian partners, which I think we have done, so we're very happy about that, and yes, the portal is being developed on the internet, and yeah, it's there for everybody to use, and on our own behalf, we're doing cool stuff in Mongolia, but not only there, so if there are any developers around who feel like joining Tracist, then please apply, and yes, I'll finish on that note, and thank you very much for your attention. Thank you, do you have questions? At the job portal, we can access in Mongolian language, is that possible? Yes, it has been translated, so you can access it in Mongolian language. Other questions? Do you have any feedback on how much do they use in the management from the governmental point of view? I mean, what is the impact of all this development in the policy making and management of the resources? The impact is quite large because Mongolia is realizing that they have scarce water resources, and it's highly variable. It's being researched whether it's climate change, human impact, all these things, so they are actually in the process of realizing that they have to do something, and the cooperation with the Mongolian side is very good because they're profiting from the German scientists and other scientists who are working in this field. They've adopted the European water directive to a certain extent to their needs, so yes, the impact is there, but they're still struggling to get all these river basin management plans set up for each individual catchment, so they still have work to do in that field. But we hope through the architecture that we've chosen and the ease of actually supplying all the catchments with an information system that this will help them to actually manage their water resources better. Other questions? I have a question or just a wish to you. I missed the libraries that you are using, you had a slide about those, can you take it and take that back? You were using at least the EXT JavaScript. We were using Spring, Hibernate. Spring is a security module, a framework for security. Hibernate is basically a database abstraction layer, so we have open layers as the client, and so the client doesn't directly speak with the database post-js. We use Hibernate, and then GOOXT is an ex-js enhanced library for spatial stuff. Yes, I know. I've been using the GOOXT. What is your experience with it? It was a bit stalled for a while, I think, and then it's got the... Yes, we took it over. We took over GOOXT. So we now have the server, and we're now kind of... With the maintainers. With the maintainers. With the maintainers, currently of GOOXT. The problem with GOOXT is currently that the ex-js license is a bit problematic. So... Is it dual license? Yes, it's a dual license, but they're changing it, and they're changing it so that not everybody's happy with the license. So GOOXT is a wonderful library, and you can get very good results very fast. So the only problem with this is the license. The technology is perfect. So our experience is very good with GOOXT, especially in combination with open layers. I mean, this is what it is, merging open layers with ex-js. So this is why we have GOOXT. Yeah, okay, one more. Thank you. Seeing on that, I don't know why a database of a station layer like Hibernate is required, what is the advantage of having it? Why you needed this? It is so that you can exchange the databases without having to reprogram the whole application. If you use a database abstraction layer, you can say start off with Oracle. A lot of people have Oracle. And if they want to merge to say post-js or PostgreSQL, it's very easy to do because you can sort of pull out the database underneath. You put in a new database, but all the requests, they get translated by Hibernate. So this is the advantage of having this abstraction layer in between. And I mean, there are any number of other databases. I've just mentioned Oracle, but there's MSSQL and whatever else. So Hibernate will actually allow you to actually switch from database to database. And since we want to reuse these applications, and then somebody says, okay, I don't have Post-js, I have something else, it's no big problem for us because we have this abstraction layer in there. Okay, thank you once again. Well, thank you.
The next speaker is Henrik Paulsen. He will talk of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. And located in Berlin. So also in Germany, it's a research institute specializing in the research that you have to bear in mind, Mongolia is an extreme country, which means that winter begins very harsh climate. So this is one thing why all has a spatial context. So the big other build a spatial data infrastructure that will in 2006, it's funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research, and initially they funded development, so we were on Skype, we were doing setting up water resources management that can be we're using since they're open source were capacity development that we're doing, we're very something, and the cooperation with the Mongolian were using Spring, Hibernate. Spring is a security module, a framework for security.