DataWeb for Integrated Environmental Information Systems – An Abstract View on disy Cadenza

Abstract

This paper describes the DataWeb, a software platform used to query and analyse (integrated) environmental databases. The requirements and the solutions are similar in many respects to those of the World-Wide Web – with the important difference that it queries, analyses and visualizes structured data stored in environmental databases, as opposed to documents available on the World-Wide Web. The approach is not a theoretical one: the requirements and the solutions result from over a decade of R&D effort in environmental information systems and many of the ideas are already implemented in a platform called disy Cadenza, used in numerous environmental information systems.