Theme Park Environment as an example of environmental information systems for the public
Presenting environmental information to the public with the intention of enhancing the understanding of the environment and promoting environmental awareness requires the creation of dedicated types of environmental information systems (EIS). This paper presents concepts for the structure, contents, and implementation of such EIS for the public, with the Theme Park Environment (http://themenpark-umwelt.baden-wuerttemberg.de/) serving as an example. The Theme Park Environment has been developed by Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe and the State Institute for Environmental Protection for the Ministry of the Environment of Baden-Wrttemberg. It contains information about soil, geology, and nature and interlinks this environmental information with other topics, such as local food production, historic site information, and environmental policy to increase the interest of the users. The system uses concepts of content management and multimedia systems with map server technology and database-driven structured information access for combining structured environmental information, location-based information, and text and multimedia contents in integrated Web pages. By means of an embedded ontology-based system, authors can relate different parts of content objects with each other and with multimedia contents, maps, fact information in databases, and other description parts. In this way, information within the Theme Park Environment can be reorganised dynamically and contents can be reused and shared easily.
environmental awareness environmental information systems (eis) eis for the public (peis) architecture of peis environmental portals integration of environmental information