Air Quality Portals - Designing Citizen-centred Supply Chains for the Dissemination of Air Quality Information

Abstract

Environmental information represents an attractive business asset once perceived as levels of comfort improving the daily life of citizens. The need for high-quality information services is further supported by several European directives to inform the citizen about environmental conditions as well as ongoing initiatives concerning access, dissemination and exploitation of public sector information (PSI). Although elementary publishing services are available, e.g. web servers on air quality, the question arises of how to reach and eventually impact the citizen with information on air quality and how to establish sustainable supply chains for environmental content. In this paper, we will present the air quality portals designed and evaluated in project APNEE and APNEE-TU which implement citizen-centred information services by employing a complementary array of technologies in a customised fashion. Operation of these information services requires a specific business partnership to implement a supply chain of trusted content from the source of environmental information, i.e. the environmental management systems, to the citizen, i.e. the customer of high-quality content. This paper reports on the innovative design of the service platform for pro-active content dissemination, as well as stakeholders and business perspectives for a sustainable operation of APNEE/APNEE-TU.