Preparing a New Generation of Environmental Information Systems

Abstract

Obviously, sustainability in the information society cannot be realized efficiently without new computer science techniques and software architectures. Furthermore, data services should be available to support the worldwide management of environmental problems . Also open method services should be provided. In this paper it is stated that geoscientists - being on duty of examining environmental problems - should cooperate with computer scientists to meet the coming challenges. These challenges particularly touch the modelling and management of 3D/4D and multimedia data, the control of very large data sets, the integration of heterogeneous data sources and the cooperation between distributed environmental information systems. We focus on the system integration aspects describing the way from monolithic software systems to a new generation of distributed environmental information systems. Finally we give an outlook on our future research.