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Concept and tasking of InGrid-Portal

InGrid-Portal, Germany’s environment portal, provides a central point to access several million intent pages as well as over 500.000 catalogue- and data base entries of public institutions and organisations in the Federation, the Federal States and the Local Authorities. With a mix of current news, environmental readings (e.g. current ozone concentration in the air, water quality), background information and historic environment events, InGrid-Portal is aimed at interested lay persons as well as the specialist audience. The information provided is being continually added to with the aim of capturing all official providers of environment information over the long term.

The EU environment guideline of 2003 and the planned INSPIRE guideline played an important role in the conception of InGrid-Portal. These guidelines lay down new standards for the public dissemination of official environment information respectively the construction of the information technology infrastructures necessary for this. In future, signficantly more authorities and organisations than heretofore will be obliged to provide data relevant to the environment in a clear understandable and easily accessible form

InGrid and the software especially developed for the construction of the InGrid-Portal were especially conceived as tools to support the authorities in implementing the guidelines.

The InGrid-Portal operators

InGrid-Portal was developed as a follow-up project of the environment data catalogue (UDK) and of the German Environmental Information Network (gein) within the framework of the Federal Republic of Germany Federal States administration agreement (Verwaltungsvereinbarung UDK/GEIN). The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) and the Environment Ministries of 16 German Federal States were signatories to the administration agreement. InGrid-Portal is managed and maintained from a technical and contents point of view by the Coordination Center InGrid-Portal in the Lower Saxony Ministry for Environment, Energy and Climate Protection in Hanover.

Function overview

Search: Central function of the Portal is the InGrid-Portal-Search (Search), with the help of which web pages and data base entries can be searched via a customary full text search (Simple Search), but can also be searched using a differentiated specialist vocabulary (Advanced Search).

Topics: The InGrid-Portal topic pages provide a topic-based access to selected, particularly interesting information and data (topic pages).

Data: InGrid-Portal keeps you informed around the clock about the current state of your environment (environmental monitoring data).

Service: Here you can find news and information about events and current publications in the environment field.

Catalogues: Here you can investigate in the environmental and geo data catalogues (e.g. Umweltdatenkataloge) from Federation and Federal States.

Maps: A maps viewer offers the possibility of entering spatial references for the search via interactive maps or else to display digital maps from the search results list directly in InGrid-Portal.

Information sources in InGrid-Portal

InGrid-Portal is a convenient and user-friendly portal to environment information in the internet. In contrast to most portals and search engines, InGrid-Portal gathers not only web pages, text documents and other internet formats but can also access databases and specialist information systems, even when these are not online.

How to become information provider in InGrid-Portal

In InGrid-Portal all German public environmental information refering to the EU environment guideline of 2003 and all environmental catalogue entries refering to INSPIRE are welcome to be integrated. The following German information providers are welcome:

• Public environmental departements from Federation and Federal States
• Other departments from Federation and Federal States
• Information binding companies refereing to the EU environment guideline of 2003
• Municipalities
• Public research institutions

If your organisation would likewise like to make environmentally relevant information available, please contact the Coordination Center InGrid-Portal.

InGrid – the software behind InGrid-Portal

The InGrid software package was developed to realise InGrid-Portal. InGrid is positioned on modular and flexible system architecture based on licence-free open source products. This way it becomes possible to adapt the technical structure of the environment information net to changing organisational specifications. Thus, if needed, regional environment portals, e.g. for individual German Federal States or Local Authorities can be created with minimal technical expense. Thanks to Open Source the follow up use of the software is license free and free of cost for partners of the VwV UDK/GEIN.