The European system OSIRIS, developed under Thales Communications coordination, offers services improving the continuous monitoring of the environment and the real time management of a crisis. OSIRIS has been successfully experimented in real conditions in four major environmental situations. These experiments have demonstrated the innovative architecture of OSIRIS, from acquisition of information to its operational exploitation. Extensions to the system were realized to cover additional security requirements, with a demonstration on land border surveillance.

These experiments are the results of three years of work led in the frame of OSIRIS, a GMES project. OSIRIS has been co-funded by European Commission, Information Society and Media, in the 6th Framework Programme, with a total budget of 11 millions Euros. Coordinated by Thales Communications, it brought together 13 partners from industry, research institutes, end-users.

GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) is one of the Europe’s flagship programmes aiming at creating an European-wide capability to acquire, analyse, process and distribute information in support of European environment and security directives.
GMES provides services based on data from satellites and a range of in-situ sensors including airborne observation systems as well as ground-based systems (e.g. water analysers, air analysers, seismographs) to improve Europe’s environment and in turn, the quality of life for its citizens.
The OSIRIS generic and innovative Service Oriented Architecture offers, through its portal, a set of standardized web services (from OGC – Open Geospatial Consortium) and additional added value services for accessing to the information and for managing in-situ observation systems used in the environmental and security domains.
Thanks to this architecture, sensors and data can be managed, information distributed and exploited through Internet, for instance in a Geographic Information System. OSIRIS allows the fusion and presentation of the information to get a better knowledge of the operational picture and thus enhance the efficiency of the related missions. Addressing smart deployment, use and reconfiguration of in-situ sensor systems, the OSIRIS proposed architecture is scalable to allow for easy integration of new sensor data to further improve the quality of service.

The OSIRIS solution has been deployed successfully in four major operational situations with the use of innovative means and sensors, including a UAV: air quality management in Spain, fresh water quality management in Italy, fire in an industrial building in Germany, and finally forest fire in France.

These successes have confirmed the interest of the OSIRIS architecture which is now operationally deployed in Italy for water quality management.

The experimentations were extremely ambitious and involved end-users of different areas. They showed the relevance of the OSIRIS system for addressing the everyday needs for the management of information.

Since the above demonstrations, additional features were brought by Thales to the OSIRIS services, especially to deal with earth observation from satellites. This was ensured and demonstrated for land–border surveillance in the frame of the GMES-Limes project.

The OSIRIS system has been presented to an important number of European workshops related to environment and security.
Two important comments are:
   • The OSIRIS system has been qualified as a cornerstone of the future European system GMES,
   • The OSIRIS system is an important component for the establishment of SEIS:
            o Management of data closely to its production,
            o One production, several possible usages,
            o A solution for e-environment.
The paradigms evolve. The world moves, with unpredictable and new vulnerabilities, and this calls an open and collaborative approach of the security questions: environmental security, sanitary security (water and air quality), natural resources security (water, air, forest), infrastructures and plants security, illegal immigration and terrorism, at the Regional, National, European, World size.
Then the OSIRIS system is particularly relevant in the environmental and security domains to facilitate the management and knowledge of the situations at the local/regional/national levels and to contribute to the European GMES system.