Founded in late 1995 its work is guided by the task of the European Environment Agency (EEA) to provide up-to-date, harmonised, reliable information on the state of the European environment.
The mission of the ETC/CDS is :
- to conceptualise and implement a locator system for environmental metainformation from all Network members in Europe - the Catalogue of Data Sources (CDS)
- to harmonise and promote concepts for registering and locating this information
- to provide environmental metainformation for the EEA, the EIONET and the public on:
- WHO is responsible for
- WHAT Information in Europe
- WHICH form and
- WHERE the data exists
as well as
- HOW to get access to it
The ETC/CDS collects and maintains metadata of the EEA, its member organisations and of 13 PHARE countries, based on specific selection criteria (Addresses e.g. EEA / EIONET members and institutions; Data sources e.g. EEA Products, EU legislation, State of the Environment reports). The ETC/CDS organises meetings and workshops on these special issues of CDS and related objectives.
Several tools have been developed to support the different tasks:
- for the data collection the WinCDS based on Access. This cataloguing tool allows to describe different data sources e.g. maps, documents, data sets, address information and more. WinCDS runs on Windows98, Nt 4.0.
- for online retrieval/distribution the online cataloguing system WebCDS. Data can be updated online (JAVA driven upload interface) or by using usual data exchange formats. Momentary the data is stored by an Oracle database. User interactivity features are programmed in JAVA or simple HTML. This online system is available for Sun, HP and Linux Server. If you are interested contact us.
- for indexing and retrieval - the Search and indexing functions of both applications are based on the GEMET - the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus - available for free
New tools are currently under development:
- to update and maintain metainformation -just-in-time- and from different sites with the UpdateModule
- to search distributed catalogues with WebCDS+ and bring together Earth Observation and environmental metainformation. Have a look also at EEIS - European Environmental Information System for further information!
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