Towards Environmental Analytics: DPSIR as a System of Systems

DPSIR (Driving forces, Pressures, States, Impacts, Responses) is a framework addressing the needs of environmental data reporting and assessment, extensively exploited by the European Union, its Member States and associated countries. The DPSIR framework does not model the environment, however it implies a systems model. Making such model explicit allows users to better understand the semantics of the five DPSIR components, therefore improving the harmonization and quality of the reported data, in particular in order to process them as Big Data. To such purpose, the tools provided by the systems theory are useful, specifically the system-of-systems (SoS) point of view. On such basis, a conceptual model of the relationships between the constituent systems of the socio-ecological system (SES) is proposed. As a result of such analysis some possible evolutions of DPSIR are envisaged, in terms of expanded and refined environmental data flows. Such evolutions aim to build a better integrated environmental knowledge base, as a prerequisite to a wider exploitation of analytics for the relevant decision processes and management activities.