Cooperative management of data and services for environmental applications

In recent years, systems for processing environmental information have been evolving from research and development systems to practical applications. Many of these systems already support environmental activities of the public sector. Most of these systems, however, were developed as island solutions. The integration of such heterogeneous systems and the support of cooperation on a regional, national and international scale is a big challenge of today. It requires new methods to access and make use of the services and data offered by the agencies of such distributed system. Metadata (such as in data and service dictionaries) and codata (such as spatiotemporal references) must be provided in order support the proper usage of these data and services. Systems integration techniques are required in order to overcome the heterogeneity of the existing systems. An approach to fulfill these requirements is shown by examples from recent work at FAW that has been conducted in the context of the Environmental Information System Baden-Wuerttemberg. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: RO 9630(95008) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEDEGerman