Trends of environmental information systems in the context of the European Water Framework Directive

In Europe, the development of Environmental Information Systems for the water domain is heavily influenced by the need to support the processes of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). The aim of the WFD is to ensure that all European waters, these being groundwater, surface or coastal waters, are protected according to a common standard. While the WFD itself does only include concrete information technology (IT) recommendations on a very high-level of data exchange, regional and/or national environmental agencies build or adapt their information systems according to their specific requirements in order to deliver the results for the first WFD reporting phase on time. Moreover, as the WFD requires a water management policy centered on natural river basin districts instead of administrative and political regions, the agencies have to co-ordinate their work, possibly across national borders. On this background, the present article analyses existing IT recommendations for the WFD implementation strategy and motivates the need to develop an IT Framework Architecture that comprises different views such as an organisational, a process, a data and a functional view. After having presented representative functions of operational water body information systems for the thematic and the co-operation layer, the article concludes with a summary of future IT developments that are required to efficiently support the WFD implementation.