An Interactive Decision Support System for Analyzing and Linkage of Weather-Related Restrictions of Opencast Lignite Mines

Abstract

The operation of open-cast lignite mines is a large intervention in nature, making the areas uninhabitable even after closing the mines without renaturation processes. Renaturation of these large areas requires a regional planning process which is tied to many conditions and restrictions, such as environmental protection laws. The related information is available only as unstructured text in a variety of documents. Associated temporal aspects and the geographical borders to these textual information have to be linked manually so far. This process is highly time-consuming, error-prone, and tedious. Therefore, the knowledge of experts is often used, but this does not necessarily include all the relevant information. In this paper, we present a system to support the experts in decision-making of urban planning, renaturation, and redevelopment projects. The system allows to plan new projects, while considering spatial and temporal restrictions extracted from text documents. With this, our presented system can also be used to verify compliance with certain legal regulations, such as nature conservation laws.