an emerging field centering around the development of standards and protocols, both technical and institutional, for sharing and integrating environmental data and information.

• environmental science
• biodiversity
• information science or informatics (taking the latter term in the non-European and hence broader sense, and including web development).

Classification Problems

Looking at existing web directories, category systems, and thesauri that are designed to provide access to the disciplines listed above, one quickly finds that there is little agreement on what subtopics should be used to provide access to environmental information resources.

Based on our early research into some of these vocabularies, we developed a preliminary classification structure for the Biosphere Data Project. This current topical access breakdown - adapted from the CERES environmental thesaurus, taxonomic concepts from the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology, and the course titles of the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS), University of California, Berkeley - can be seen on our Resources page.

The European Environment Agency has developed a topical breakdown that can serve as a possible alternative model. It has some advantages as a high-level organization scheme for environmental informatics classification and topical access. There are five initial categories - issues, sectors, media, areas, and actions - that have a striking initial clarity:

This scheme is more activity-oriented than discipline-oriented. One could also restate the five topic areas above as follows:

Processes (for Issues)
Institutions
Media (no change here)
Geography or Space
Activities

This might offer our site some useful and innovative ways of breaking down environmental informatics topics. It presents some alternatives to using "data types" for different information sources. Doing the latter, as we have on this site, is perhaps too static a classification to represent the development of information resources.

It can of course be quite valuable, in providing information access, to have a relatively static categorization scheme. That is, for many information retrieval tasks, using the concept of data type or resource type may be the most appropiate thing to do.

In the case of a field in as much flux as environmental informatics, however, it may be necessary to look at some other categorization tradeoffs. Research tasks and capabilities are being redefined by rapid technological development: the coevolution of a host of technologies in remote sensing, satellite communication, on-the-fly georeferencing, information storage and processing, and the standards development process -- which we suggest is the core of this emerging discipline. In this setting, a more complex scheme may be in order.

It is extremely difficult to classify topics in environmental informatics in a way that will be acceptable and clear to all the different constituencies involved in the field. The world, alas, doesn't come precategorized, and the qualitative social sciences may have a real role to play here. (If you disagree, please post to our forums. These discussions will be a healthy beginning to this site.)

A classification scheme that will help to bring coherence to a field in which researchers and developers are applying changing information tools to support the work of scientific disciplines and political institutions that are themselves frequently evolving is a tough nut to crack. This is where rich conceptions of standards and vocabularies (both broadly defined) that may be able to cross disciplinary boundaries might be a starting point for the collaborative work that this website seeks to support. When we are creating standards that are designed to endure the test of time, we must look for classification schemes that specify the processes and activities of researchers and institutional actors at the appropriate level of abstraction, so that they can evolve with changing technologies and institutions without losing their effectiveness as categories. This concern must be balanced against comprehensibility and present-day utility, however, and no solution will meet all needs optimally.

XML Developments
The Biosphere Project's XML page describes the standard and lists important recent developments in XML