Environmental Public Sector Information - The present path to increasing transparency and democracy

This paper intends to provide insight in current political decisions and administrative requirements for production, processing and dissemination of environmental information. It should stimulate the discussion between the demand for exchange of environmental knowledge and some leading-edge experiences of ICT applications in the Environmental Informatics network. It is demonstrated, that environmental informatics provides currently a substantial toolbox with eEnvironment services for information integration in a Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) with ecologic and economic relevance within the Digital Agenda 2020. In the paper a sketch of a European environmental information production is given and conclusions are drawn for further research in the area of Environmental Informatics. 1. Transparency in environmental matters supported by ICT generated Environmental Information Free access to environmental information increasingly converges to its implementation. Public Sector Information is fostered by national and EU’s legislation, by the “eGovernment movement” and by environmental programmes like INSPIRE, GEO, GEOSS, Copernicus (past GMES), “Eye on Earth” etc. The European Research Area ERA and its successor Open Access in “Horizon 2020” pave the way to transparency and increasing access to environmental information. Early steps in freedom of environmental information were initiated in the 1960ies in Japan (after pollution diseases e.g. the Minimata poisoning) and 1987 in the USA with the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act and concluded by the UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, usually known as the Aarhus Convention, was signed on June 25, 1998 in the Danish city of Aarhus. It entered into force on 30 October 2001. As of July 2013, it had been ratified by 45 states and the European Union (EU). In the history of EU’s legislative acts the Council Directive “Public access to Environmental Information” 90/313/EEC constituted the first time the common understanding for its important matter. In parallel the discussion of transparency, or sometimes called openness in English, involves the way through which public bodies make decisions understandable reasoned and open (Söderman 2001). In 2003 this early directive was repealed by 2003/4 EC on public access to environmental information, the basis of free access to non personalized information. As an example towards a semantic web, the EU website http://open-data.europa.eu/ comprises a beta version of an Open Data Portal with at present about 6.000 datasets, 95% from EUROSTAT, 2% environmental information from the European Environment Agency. Visual applications for access of data, technical information for application developers about Linked Data http://open-data.europa.eu/en/linkeddata and some tutorials for RDF, semantic modeling and data querying are included http://www.linkeddatatools.com/semantic-web-basics. All data can be used free, can be reused, linked and redistributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes http://open-data.europa.eu/en/. A more extended 1 International Society for Environmental Protection (ISEP), Bechardgasse 24/12, 1030 Vienna, Austria. eMail: [email protected] 2 Umweltbundesamt Wien, Spittelauer Lände 13, 1090 Vienna, Austria. eMail: [email protected] 3 Masaryk University, Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses, Kamenice 126/3, 625 00 Brno, CZ. eMail: [email protected] EnviroInfo 2013: Environmental Informatics and Renewable Energies Copyright 2013 Shaker Verlag, Aachen, ISBN: 978-3-8440-1676-5