A Pan-European Information System on Environmental Informatics Research Programmes and Projects

In order to overcome the problem of national fragmentation of Europeanresearch in the field of ICT for environmental sustainability in general and in the field ofEnvironmental Informatics in particular, the ICT-ENSURE project has been launched. Theproject aims at building a pan-European research area in this field and has been funded bythe European Union within its 7th Framework Programme. A main objective within ICTENSUREis the provision of information on national research programmes and projects inthe European Union in the field of ICT for environmental sustainability. For this, a webbasedinformation system has been developed. The system provides meta information onresearch programmes to programme managers and scientists in the field and by doing so, itshall help to avoid redundant developments. The system has been developed with free andopen source software based on the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. For thecharacterisation of research programmes and projects, a classification scheme has beendeveloped. European national experts compile the meta information on national researchprogrammes and enter this information into the system by means of an authoringcomponent. The presentation component of the system offers various search and navigationfacilities to the end users. The search facilities provide information retrieval capabilitiesfrom the database via full text search and attribute search. The navigation facilities allowbrowsing the database via different access and navigation paths.