Customization in Environmental Information Systems

Abstract

The world of information today is an increasingly diverse, distributed, and fragmented one. As the amount of information available in digital form continues to increase, so does the number of systems that are employed to make that information available. Often environmental information systems provide functionality which is based on metadata, i.e. data describing data, in order to support users in searching for and retrieving data required to perform a specific task. Support for customization and personalisation of these metadata according to the personal needs of a user can further increase the potential benefit and effectiveness of environmental information systems. Against this background, the paper introduces a customization architecture which allows users to customize environmental information systems according to their personal needs. To better illustrate how such systems can benefit from customization, the paper also presents the status quo of our prototype implementation.