Soil information sharing
Efficient soil information sharing is essential for collaboration between regional states on long term soil monitoring and soil contamination assessments.
XML soil information sharing schema
The UBA collects information on the physical, chemical and biological status of Germany’s soils.
This information forms the basis for updating guide values and limit values. When new soil protection issues arise in particular, it can in some cases be extremely important to be able to quickly access a maximum amount of soil information from as many regional states as possible. For this, efficient technical standards for data sharing are needed. In addition EU requirements for soil information availability were recently introduced, via a harmonized standard (INSPIRE Directive and Geodata access law).
Inasmuch as information sharing efficiency is based on interfaces and standardized formats, the UBA has published an XML schema containing the current status of the list of requirements for long term soil monitoring and other issues.
Once the relevant information has been transferred to this format from the long term soil monitoring database, the data can be transferred to any application desired, because the structure is defined and the data is readily accessible for conversion programs. This in turn saves time and money. The XML schema and the counterpart files with *.xsd file-name extensions constitute the interface, thus obviating the need for any other transferability verification software.
