Helmut Lessing and Walter Swoboda Niedersächsisches Umweltministerium Archivstr. 2 30169 Hannover, Germany
Abstract
In this paper we give an overview of the UDK project, an international
software engineering effort to facilitate access to environmental data.
The UDK (Environmental Data Catalogue) is a metainformation system
and navigation tool that documents collections of
environmental data from the government and other sources.
Potential users of the system include
government agencies, industry, as well as the general public.
Technically, the UDK is based
on a three-way object model that distinguishes between environmental
objects, environmental data objects, and UDK (meta) objects. Each
(real-world) environmental object is described by a collection
of environmental data objects. Each environmental data object
is in turn associated with exactly one UDK object that specifies its
format and contents. UDK objects are classified in accordance with an
object-oriented inheritance hierarchy. They may
be connected in a hypertext fashion to represent
semantic associations, such as maintenance responsibilities
and aggregation relationships. In January 1995, a first
version of the UDK was made available in Austria; most German states
will follow shortly. We also expect a prototypical version of the UDK
to be available on the World Wide Web by early 1996.
