Information and data on the environment are the foundation for sustainable development and, as such, must be easily accessible, freely available, valid, and transparent. In this context, we are currently developing the umwelt.info web portal – a platform that aims to provide a central point of access to all information on environment-related topics that is publicly available across Germany. The data and information will be made available in target-group-specific forms to all citizens, the scientific community, educators, enterprises, and industries as well as to public administrators. In order to develop this key instrument of the German environmental information landscape, the German Environment Agency is establishing the National Centre for Environmental and Nature Conservation Information in Merseburg, together with the associated web portal umwelt.info. The spectrum of information this platform will cover is presently intended to include environment-related metadata, services, reports, research results, expert assessments, and educational materials as well as information on legal and administrative regulations, funding programmes, or administrative procedures in relevant fields.
Which audience does the platform address?
A large proportion of environmental data and information can be found in specialised databases, the operation of which can be very complex and is often tailored to professionally motivated users and experts. In theory, this content is freely accessible to interested citizens, but in practice, it is difficult to find – especially given the wide range of information available. This situation calls for a new approach to providing anyone who is interested with comprehensible but also well-founded answers to their questions on environmental topics or on services of the environmental administration. We aim to achieve this in the most user-friendly, low-threshold way possible, and are exploring avenues of supporting users with the help of intelligent search functions and individual assistance offered by staff. In addition, editorial content will serve as an easy point of getting started and invite users to browse by topic, content category, or data provider. We also plan to provide educators with content specifically designed for lesson planning.
We want to provide the scientific community, environmental institutions and organisations, or other NGOs with a platform that allows them to find the data sets and information needed to offer fast, up-to-date, and comprehensive advice to political decision makers. The efforts required for companies to integrate environmental and sustainability-relevant aspects into their products, services, and business models should be reduced. At the same time, the planned data access is crucial to the use of digital technologies and innovative applications for the protection of the environment, global climate, and natural resources. At EU level, umwelt.info intends to provide the European Commission with a better overview of the environmental information and data available in Germany as a whole.
Metadata and data will first be retrieved via standardised interfaces. Once they appear in umwelt.info, they may, for instance, be used to manage environmental infrastructures, from where they can be transferred back to environmental databases as part of a highly interconnected system. The long-term objective is that politics and administration benefit from improved access, processing, linking, and evaluation of environmental data.
Current development status and next steps
The feasibility study published in January 2021 (German only with English summary) examined the initial situation from a legal, technical, and organisational standpoint, and analysed the target groups with their individual needs. Based on these framework conditions combined with an assessment of economic viability, the feasibility of the project was confirmed and first drafts were created.
Proceeding from these findings, a growing multidisciplinary team is currently developing the technical and IT-related concept for implementation. The first five employees of the umwelt.info platform have started their work in the main areas of conceptualisation/coordination, data management, and content creation; further team members will follow in the course of 2023. The initial stages of development largely focus on setting up the designed IT infrastructure and indexing the metadata of publicly available data and information sources on environmental and nature conservation topics in Germany. Throughout the following stages, we will use the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and linked data to further expand the functionalities of the portal. This is intended to facilitate data searches, potentially improve quality management of the (meta) data, and optimise data usability.
Source: German Environment Agency
