The GENESIS FP7 Integrated Project has been launched by DG INFSO in September 2008. The duration of the project is 3 years. The GENESIS consortium comprehends the 29 partners involved in the project ; the Coordinator of the project is Thales Alenia Space France. The GENESIS Consortium brings a wide panel of multidisciplinary skills and experiences :

• participants skilled and experienced in ICT and related domains are key actors to define a reference collaborative architecture, and to make an efficient and sustainable solution;
• participants skilled and experienced in environmental domains as well as in health issues are key actors for the identification of users requirements, definition and implementation of the pilots, evaluation and take-up of the solution.

Relying on standards and harmonization processes, GENESIS offers a thematic-independant innovative solution : made of a generic software package. It is used as an "information system set-up framework", which provides the interoperability layer to existing information systems, so that they can access to environmental databases or services available at regional, national or European levels. The proposed solution, highly flexible and scalable, can be easily instantiated and customized to various thematic fields and various contexts all over Europe. The GENESIS framework is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), where software components are grouped in classes of services; each class providing a particular type of function.

The GENESIS software is composed of generic (thematic-neutral) software components (core services, web portal components, data & metadata models) and toolkits (for the configuration and the deployment of the information systems in specific thematic contexts) and is accompanied by the necessary documentation. The GENESIS software is developed in full compliance with existing standards (OGC, OASIS, INSPIRE,..¦), and whenever required or relevant, GENESIS proposes either the evolution of these existing standards or the development of new standards for uncovered needs. Consequently, the new thematic information systems built by using the GENESIS solution inherits the standard interoperability features.

Applications are built by selecting from this toolbox the right set of components or web services. The GENESIS solution is validated and demonstrated through a set of pilots focused on the environmental thematic fields : Air Quality and Fresh Surface Water Quality and their impact on health. The proposed pilot scenarios have been selected to validate that the GENESIS solution copes with an high variety of environmental contexts involving several geographical scales, several kinds of actors and very different organizational models. The use cases taken from the thematic domains, involving health actors, address a wide range of data and services to demonstrate the benefits listed above, as well as the flexibility of GENESIS. The thematic actors play a leading role in the selection of innovative technologies included in GENESIS solution through an interactive process in synergy with technology experts.
Validation and demonstration will consist, for each pilot, in :

• Building the pilot demonstrators to run the pilot scenarios. The pilot demonstrators are the dedicated thematic information systems built by instantiating the GENESIS software with specific thematic components,
• Running the pilot experiments with operational actors from the Environmental management and Health domains,
• Collecting and analysing the feedback of the users
• Assessing the potential impacts of GENESIS solution