During the past years the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) has participated in numerous international research and development projects in the context of environmental monitoring (e.g. WISDOM) and crisis information (e.g. GITEWS). A considerable amount of software engineering has been invested in these projects. The results are mostly specialized solutions that, on the one hand, fulfill the respective project requirements optimally but, on the other hand, are not easily transferable to other tasks and projects.
To ease and accelerate the future development of information systems and to enable the transfer of knowledge from previous projects, DFD has started to implement a modular framework for geoscientific application development in 2011. The generic UKIS modules can be used for the implementation of web-based warning systems for different kinds of natural hazards (e.g. wildfires and tsunamis) or for environmental information systems (e.g. snow cover, change detection). UKIS highly focuses on the sustainability and reusability of the modules for different specialized applications.
Typical UKIS applications are based on satellite data as input data as well as numerous UKIS modules. Each module fulfills a dedicated task within the system, e.g. the binding of simulation models, decision support or the presentation of information in a user interface.