Tasks and Functions of the Bavarian Environmental Object Catalogue in Meeting the Requirements Imposed by Environmental Legislation

Abstract

The claim for opening the information bases of the administration for general use has been underpinned by federal and state laws in the past few years. Many of the relevant regulations are based on EU directives and international law and de facto on the utilization of the internet that has become a matter of course. The briefly described legal bases point the way towards a provision of information by the administration. In a addition, there are the requirements of eGovernment and eBusiness for cross-sector and inter-departmental services of the state. The services can only be realized as a joint task. This requires a change of paradigm in the administration. Authorities will only very slowly part with their way of thinking oriented by administrative service. In the economy, acting oriented by the market is a matter of course. Only the eGovernment initiatives are pointing towards market-oriented services, such as the Bund Online 2005 initiative. Within the scope of the eGovernment initiatives, some inter-departmental applications begin to emerge. An initial step was made by including the health department of the city of Munich as a client. The service of the UOK is the identification and/or provision of data for information. It is a condition for the required systematic and comparable provision of environmental data that they will be actually found. The Environmental Object Catalogue (UOK2) takes account of the requirement for systematics. The basis of the UOK is a native XML internet database that consistently uses the current standard of XML technology. Native XML databases store the XML data without conversion into relational databases. That way, the XML data that are based on respective technical and professional standards and interfaces are processed directly and without any losses (a conversion of complex XML structures into relational forms is not exactly reversible).