Introduction and Goals

SNS makes the environmental thesaurus UMTHES and the Environmental Chronicle publicly accessible and provides various services, such as automatic keyword assignment for documents or suggestions for similar search terms.

Linking information and data about the environment has been a fundamental concern of the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt, UBA) since the 1990s. This has already been pursued through several generations of projects. However, all previous implementations share two common weaknesses:

• Only data containers (databases, information systems, complex websites) were ever linked with each other, not individual data records.
• There was no uniform data structure, so every cross-reference effectively ended at the gates of the referenced data holdings, at best on a web page describing access to them.

The explicit goal of this project is therefore to enable access to environmental information through open standards, in a form readable by both humans and machines.

Objectives

• Development of sustainable integration patterns and tools
• Provision of reusable software components that can also be used and adapted by third parties
• Provision of an intuitive user interface based on standardized RDF data interfaces (RDF, SKOS)
• Provision of interfaces for the semantic support of environmental informatics applications
• Creation of added informational value through cross-database navigation and search patterns

Quality goals

Key goals for the software, according to the definitions in ISO/IEC 9126 and 25000, are:

• Efficiency: Cost-effective operations with short response times
• Conformity: Compliance with W3C standards for Linked Data and the Semantic Web
• Interoperability: Platform independence (operating system, database, hardware/infrastructure)
• Functionality: Support for the specific requirements of the German Environment Agency in the further development and maintenance of SNS

Project participants

Role	Organization
System stewardship, editorial work	UBA
Development	INNOQ
Operations	UBA