Discovery and analysis of environmental information based on formalised terminology

Although the use of formalised environmental terminology nowadays gets popular in practice, the full benefit that can be drawn from it them is by far not yet reached. In terms of expressivity, the most advanced form of environmental terminologies are ontologies which are specified formally by means of formal logics. The availability of formal ontologies promotes automation of content provision and integrated access to structured and unstructured information resources via customised user interfaces for domain experts and public users. The paper introduces mechanisms for semantic annotation and automatic classification as essential base technologies that open the door to better information discovery, analysis and integration. We report experiences of their application in selected projects, namely the development of semantic extensions for geospatial catalogues in the context of the ORCHESTRA project and ontology-based information integration of environmental information systems in Baden-Württemberg/Germany. Thereby, special attention is paid to the fact that semantic extensions exert a minimum of impact to the available, grown infrastructure for conventional information retrieval.