A.: Water protection information management by syntactic and semantic interoperability of heterogeneous repositories

Abstract. One of the most prominent themes concerning environment is the inner and marine water protection. The information required for developing such a theme is very large, having to cover numerous and various fields of knowledge: geography, chemistry, hydrology, geology, biology, physics, economics and social sciences. The national Institutions devoted to cope with this theme, such as the Italian Agency for Environmental Protection and Technical Services (APAT), have to solve two fundamental problems: how to collect such a large mass of information, and how to access the information and retrieve coherent data to process in order to perform easy, fast and reliable decision making. The first problem has been solved by APAT in successive steps, as the technology progressively changed, producing large collections of data stored in several technologically distinct repositories. However, accessing data sources individually and then combining the results manually every time an information is needed can be awfully time-consuming. In this paper we present a project which addresses interoperability of environmental information systems both at the syntactic and semantic level. The former is addressed through a federated database system which provides a global view of independent dat