The decision to build the Swedish EnviroNet (http://smn.environ.se/) was taken by the Swedish government in December 1996. The building of the EnviroNet was one of several proposals in an Official Report on "Information Technology in Environmental Management" from the Environmental Council. The constitution of the Project Board and Project Organisation was decided by the Director General of the Environmental Protection Agency in February 1997.

Mission

The Swedish EnviroNet shall become the main www-gateway to electronic data and information on the Swedish environment. The EnviroNet shall provide easy access to information with high quality content.

Members

The EnviroNet organises major public agencies, NGO's and private companies in the environmental field. The information is published at the web sites of the members and the EnviroNet server provides links, metadata and other general services. Only member web sites are included in the environmental catalogue and accessible through the EnviroNet search engine.

Users

The most important user group for the EnviroNet are professionals working with environmental issues in Sweden. But the EnviroNet will fulfil the needs of wider user groups, such as: environmental activists, students and teachers, politicians and the press.

Services

• A catalogue with links to documents provided by the members
• A search engine that covers all the member web sites
• Electronic conferences
• E-mail catalogue

Catalogues and metadata

The EnviroNet provide links to electronic documents (usually in HTML-format). The document can contain information or point to other sources that contain information or data. The contents of the documents is described using a subset of the Dublin Core (DC) metadata standard. The type element is used to describe the Resources referred to, i.e thesis, review, database, advertisement etc.

The EnviroNet provides a classification scheme for the subject and type elements in DC. The classification scheme for subject has terms that correspond to all the branches in the catalogues.

Users can search information using several different catalogues organised in the following way:

• Environmental threats
• Sectors
• Nature types
• Chemical substances
• Biological species
• Geographical areas
• General
• Environmental data

Technical platform

Members include metadata in their documents according to the standards specified by the EnviroNet. The normal procedure will be to include it in the head section of the HTML-document. Some members may want to keep their metadata in a separate database for easier maintenance. The EnviroNet has developed an application that members can use to create and edit metadata. The vocabulary for some elements (type and subject) is controlled by term lists. The application (in Swedish) is available at the EnviroNet's web site.

A robot regularly search the sites of each member for metadata and also the full text of the documents. This information is then stored in a database.

The contents of the catalogue is updated automatically, at least once a week, using the information stored in the database.

The search engine provides facilities for retrieval of information both from the description (metadata) and from the full-text documents.

Project summary by Stig Hammarsten, Annica Moshiri, and Maria Sjö