A Bottom up Approach for the Identification of Requirements and ICT solutions for Environmental Information Sharing

European guidance and policy for the development of information infrastructures recommends that new data and information handling resources should be based on existing examples, as proposed by the European Interoperability Strategy (EIS1) and the Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations (ISA2). In addition, the recent Communication on a European Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS3) outlines the need to modernize and simplify the collection, exchange and use of data and information required for the design, implementation and monitoring of environmental policy. These policy drivers present challenges in the actual identification and comparison of often heterogeneous systems within the environmental information sharing domain; including the processes and resources which support the capture/discovery, processing, validation, analysis and dissemination of data/information about the environment. To address this challenge, we present a method to gather and analyze the components of environmental information systems that can contribute to the development of information infrastructures such as SEIS. Our approach is described as (principally) \u27bottom-up\u27: a community of practitioners propose candidate systems for analysis, illustrating what approaches are currently adopted to create, manage, use environmental data/information that aim to meet the goals/principles (or \u27top-down\u27 setting) of the SEIS policy arena, while also informing this policy\u27s development itself