Aufbau eines europäischen Bodeninformations-Portals im Rahmen des eContentplus-Projekts GS Soil als Baustein für SEIS auf Basis von PortalU®-Technologie

Abstract

The availability and accessibility of environmental information has become a key concern for public and private bodies within Europe in the recent years. The European Environmental Information Directive (EEID, 2003/4/EC), the Directive for establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information (INSPIRE, 2007/2/EC) as well as the newest initiatives of the EU like the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) and the Single Information Space for the Environment (SISE) emphasizes the European-wide need to improve the access to environmental information. Especially the web-based supply of the huge amount of spatial environmental data deserves particularly attention because high organisational efforts and financial expenses are necessary to improve the access to this kind of data. While the INSPIRE Directive and its Implementing Rules (IR) give the framework to establish a European spatial data infrastructure, vital obstacles in reference to harmonization and interoperability of data and services as well as in reference to the organisational structure are not removed yet. The project GS Soil, which was handed in as proposal in the eContentplus call 2008 in June 2008, aims to make a contribution to remove these obstacles by establishing a European web portal for soil information (GS Soil Portal). Within the project 34 partners from 17 European Member States are involved. Soil data are thereby provided for all 17 states mainly on national level and partly on regional level. InGrid, the technology of the German Environmental Information Portal PortalU®, will be used as technical base in the project. It will be used to build up a European GS Soil Portal, where all decentralized distributed soil information of the 18 states is bundled.