Supporting Content Provision in Environmental Information Infrastructures

Information Infrastructures for managing and providing environmental resources are requested by numerous initiatives on regional, national, and international scales. While much research focuses on the discovery and consumption of provided content, environmental data and model provision is hardly addressed. Each time an expert creates new information or develops a novel scientific algorithm it is delegated to an expert in information and communication technology to make this content available in a given Environmental Information Infrastructure (EII). From our point of view, this workflow is a bottleneck in sharing environmental content that impedes the efficient maintenance of EII. Accordingly, we have extended the classical threelayered EII architecture with a middleware for assisted content publication and deployment. A first implementation for data publishing is in place, while investigations on the publication of environmental models are ongoing. In this position paper, we briefly present the status of our work and discuss possibilities for publishing environmental models. We point to related activities and outline our future plans. We hope that our contribution will help to increase content availability in EIIs in standard basis and thereby will aid content discovery and model composition.