Participants in the workshops organised under the umbrella of Harmoni-CA WP4 several times pointed out that it is often a problem to obtain data collected by other institutions (Steenstra et al, 2004; Kamphorst et al, 2005; Arustiene et al, 2005; Jørgensen et al 2006). Consequently, one of the main recommendations from all four workshops to policy makers was to secure that all environmental data are freely available in practise, i.e. to ensure centralised data collection and centralised databases with free access - or at least available at low costs, as too high costs for many organisations is a serious constraint (Kamphorst et al, 2005).
In connection with two of the workshops (“Remote Sensing and Data Assimilation Techniques” (Steenstra et al, 2004) and “State-of-the-art on Existing Monitoring Programmes around Europe” (Kamphorst et al, 2005)) participants described existing monitoring programmes on a regional or national basis. More mentioned the problem of getting transboundary data or even just to co-operate across borders or cross-border data harmonisation (Steenstra et al, 2004). Another problem relates to getting data at the right level to satisfy the needs of the public in stakeholder involvement procedures (Steenstra et al, 2004). Also the data format was mentioned as a problem: data are not always available digitally (Steenstra et al, 2004; Demetriou 2005; Zupan 2005). Even different institutes collecting the same data without co-operation was mentioned (Steenstra et al, 2004). Closely related data stored in different databases at different institutes or even in private companies (Pataki 2005; Koussis 2005; Heller 2005; Demetriou 2005) was also pointed out as bottlenecks in data access. It was also mentioned that in spite of politically stated good intentions, some databases are in practise not accessible from outside the monitoring authorities (Koussis 2005; Heller 2005).
In summary, the five main constraints to data accessibility are:
Internationally there are declarations of intent prescribing free assess to data – e.g. the Aarhus Convention (The UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe) Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, usually known as the Aarhus Convention, was signed on June 25, 1998 in the Danish city of Aarhus. It entered into force on 30 October 2001. As of November 2005, it has been signed by 40 (primarily European) countries and ratified by 37. It has also been ratified by the European Union, which has begun applying Aarhus-type principles in its legislation, especially the Water Framework Directive.) (UNECE, 1998) that grants the public rights regarding access to information and public participation as well as access to justice. It focuses on interactions between the public and public authorities. Article 4 of the convention secures the public access to environmental information from public authorities and, in some cases, from private parties, within a reasonable amount of time. Further, Article 5 imposes Parties and public authorities to collect and disseminate environmental information. Paragraph 3 and 4 in this article specifically mentions “Electronic databases” containing “Environmental information” as well as “National state-of-the-environment reports” within information on quality and pressures on the environment (UN, 2000).
A number of European initiatives have been launched during the last years to implement the Aarhus Convention, e.g. the INSPIRE project and the WISE web-portal.
The INSPIRE “Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe” is an EU initiated cooperative project between DG Environment, EUROSTAT and Joint Research Centre. The aim has been to trigger the creation of a European spatial information infrastructure that delivers integrated spatial information services to all users. These services should allow the user to identify and access spatial or geographical information from a wide range of sources, from the local level to the global level, in an inter-operable way for a variety of uses. The target users of INSPIRE include policy makers, planners and managers at European, national and local level and the citizens and their organisations. Possible services are the visualisation of information layers, overlay of information from different sources, spatial and temporal analysis, etc. The initiative has just recently produced an INSPIRE directive (EC, 2007) on establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information for the European Community.
WISE – the Water Information System for Europe – is another co-operation project involving European environmental institutions as the European Commission (in particular DG Environment, Joint Research Centre and EUROSTAT), the European Environmental Agency and the Member States in modernising the collection and dissemination of information on water policy etc. across Europe. The output is a new web portal launched at the World Water Day on 22 March 2007. The web portal provides access to data and reports related to the Water Framework Directive, the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, the European Environment Information and Observation Network on Water (EIONET/Water). A prototype can be seen at http://dataservice.eea.europa.eu/wise
The WISE-RTD web portal “Consolidated Experiences in Water Management” is a portal linked to WISE, which is under development by Harmoni-CA. This web-portal is a gateway allowing users to get access to information on water-related (research) projects with relevance to the WFD. A prototype of this can be seen at http://www.wise-rtd.info
INSPIRE and WISE will, when fully implemented, provide easy public access to many of the WFD relevant data and in this way some of the above problems will be solved. There are, however a number of additional data that are also required and used by water managers that will not be included in the INSPIRE and WISE. Attention is required to ensure easy accessibility for all relevant stakeholders to these data.
Data collection is often a major task in research projects. In projects where existing data are used the data collection is often cumbersome and requires a lot of resources, because the data access is difficult with many practical and economical constraints. In projects that collect new field data with standard or new experimental equipment the data collection is usually very costly. Often data collected in one research project is not used in many other projects due to lack of proper data documentation and dissemination after the termination of old projects. The same data are therefore often collected several times by different research projects. This is obviously non-optimal and requires a lot of research resources both in terms of costs and manpower that could have been utilised much better. Therefore, there is a need to make river basin data easily accessible for the scientific community. In this respect data for two different types of research projects are relevant: