From proprietary Environmental Software Systems to Interoperable Components

Rising awareness of the importance and vulnerability of the environment within the EU have led to several water related directives that culminated in the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) on 23 October 2000 [1]. Politically a revolution, the WFD has so far mainly concentrated on legislative issues and unified reporting, but leaving the question of sharing the measurements and services between monitoring networks (across country and/or administrative boarders) to a later (implementation) phase. In the meantime, the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for spatial information in Europe) and GMES (Global monitoring for environment and security) initiatives are pursuing a technically even more ambitious agenda that will eventually lead to effective merging of all the environmental monitoring networks. In this paper, the present main achievements of the WFD so far are presented. It is explained why unified reporting is not the end of the road and the resulting ICT challenges are discussed. Additionally, the architectural approach and the resulting infrastructure developed in the ORCHESTRA Integrated Project is presented.