PortalU®, a Tool to Support the Implementation of the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) in Germany

The German Environmental Information Portal, PortalU ® , provides one-stop access to government-owned environmental information in Germany. PortalU ® gives access to more than 2,500,000 webpages and more then 500,000 data and metadata sets from different national, regional and local authorities. Organisationally PortalU ® is the result of a cooperation of the federal government and the 16 German states. PortalU ® is build up by the software InGrid ® . The software is realised very modular. It includes several interfaces including WMS, CSW and OpenSearch. The portal has a set of viewing components for the visualisation of search results, maps and metadata content. A metadata catalogue, the InGrid ® Catalog, is integrated in the software. Core component of this catalogue is the ISOand INSPIRE-compliant InGrid ® Editor for collection and maintenance of metadata. A concept for the exchange and visualisation of monitoring data on the basis of the OGC-defined sensor observation service (SOS) is under development. This concept could be a model for the data exchange in a European Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS). The integration of SOS-services for data exchange and visualisation is the next step of advancement of InGrid ® and PortalU ® . From an organisational as well as from a technical point of view PortalU ® could be a prototype for a pan-European shared environmental information system.