WWW-UDK 4.0: Die neue Generation eines Web-Portals zu deutschen und österreichischen Umweltdaten

Since its introduction in 1995 the environmental data catalogue UDK (Umweltdaten- katalog) has become a de-facto standard for environmental meta-information in Ge r- man and Austrian governmental organisations. During the last year, the fourth gene- ration of WWW-UDK, a tool for publishing UDK data on the Web, was developed based on a careful user requirement analysis. A complete redesign of the software makes possible that on the one hand advanced Internet technologies could be employed and on the other hand the various requirements of the different user groups could be fulfilled. To do so, three main components have been developed: (1) HTML-UDK which provides full retrieval functionality and requires minimal client equipment only. (2) J-UDK, an integrated Java applet of graphical, interactive tools for advanced users. (3) Virtual UDK which provides for the first time searches over distributed UDK data of different catalogues. Furthermore the interaction of WWW-UDK and WinUDK is presented.