Meta Information Concepts for Environmental
Information Systems
Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft des Saarlandes
Goebenstr. 40, 66117 Saarbrücken, Germany
Email: {denzer,guettler}@htw.uni-sb.de
Presented at the second annual conference of GeoComputation ‘97 & SIRC ‘97, University of Otago, New Zealand, 26-29 August 1997
Abstract
The paper gives an overview of a number of aspects of the meta information discussion for Environmental Information Systems (EIS) over the past 7 years. While meta information has mostly been mentioned in the context of Environmental Data Catalogues (EDCs) and/or Catalogues of Environmental Data Sources (CDSs), our group uses meta information for the integration of environmental data into environmental networks. From this viewpoint, we also need EDCs and network navigation components, but our goal was one step further than the above mentioned projects: they usually stop in front of the data source and do not offer integration concepts to connect the data source into a network (Denzer,1995).In this paper, we will discuss a number of applications of different meta information models, which can be described by a general model to represent meta information. The generic idea of this model has been published(Denzer 1996). The first chapter is a modified extract of this publication in order to make clear the different implementation presented in later chapters.