The Design of a Multi-catalog System for Distributed Environmental Information Resources

A multi-catalog approach is presented that simplifies the utilization of the Web technology for the information transfer between suppliers and users of distributed environmental information resources. A Web-based facility, also referred to as Locator and Communication Service Environment (German acronym: VKSU), was designed that allows users in the German Federal Environment Agency to search for and directly access environmental information resources in the intranet of the agency. The core of VKSU is a Broker that integrates a number of specialized digital catalogs rather than build one single `universal catalog' which records as many resources as possible. This allows the VKSU to make use of the existing information infrastructure in the UBA that already comprises a variety of information catalogs and meta-information systems. 1. Starting Point In the last decade, a large number of information systems, databases, and data collections has been compiled in the German Federal Environme..