Swoboda, WalterKruse, FredNyhuis, DetlevRousselle, HolgerHaasis, H.-D.Ranze, K.C.2019-09-162019-09-161998https://dl.gi.de/handle/20.500.12116/26536In order to offer public access to environmental data, Germany and Austria have developed a meta information system called Umweltdatenkatalog (UDK). While this system has been introduced since a few years ago, a complete re-design was necessary using modem technologies of software development. The new concept of the UDK is presented in detail addressing both the datamodel and the main functionalities as the UDK-Explorer, the Thesaurus-Navigator, and the GIS-viewer. Furthermore, the update procedure of the decentralized database concept is discussed. In particular, conventional technologies are compared with Web-technologies taking into account that the WWWaccess is still very heterogeneous in local administrative institutions. As a prospect a concept of a three level ODBC architecture is presented which strongly reduces the effort of system administrators in client/serverText/Conference Paper