The Norwegian environmental meta information system

The Norwegian Ministry of Environment has undertaken to build and implement a meta information system for environmental information/data. The objective is to increase availability of cross sector information and efficiency in use of environmental information/data. The system is to be accessible via Internet, but based on SQL‐database. Further the same system may be used locally by the governmental institutions and centrally at national level. Access will be public and free of charge, software will be free of charge. The metadata will be characterized according to European standards; amongst others, by use of the multilingual environmental thesaurus (GEMET) and a standard for mandatory field entries. Interoperability with other systems is assured by used of standard communication protocols (Z.39.50). To define objectives at a high precision level and to have a development guide, a technical “Systems Requirements” were defined. Development is done with users, and by means of prototypes, laboratory and field tests.