Environmental aspects in municipal decisions
Environmental aspects have to be considered in all kinds of municipal decisions. Therefore it is crucial for municipal administrative staff to have fast and easy access to all data concerning environmental information. Also, citizen involvement and information is best achieved by an internet presentation.
Internet information system
Out of these reasons, the Environmental Authority of the city of Münster comissioned ZEBRIS with an environmental information system for the internet. Starting with the welcome page giving some information about the background of the system, the user can choose between six topics: air, climate, surface water, ground water, soil and nature/landscape, the latter including all aspects of vegetation. After selecting a topic, the user is led to a map interface where he can switch between different maps displaying information about this topic. Additionally he can get text information about the map and the displayed data. The system is easy to handle and offers a lot of functionality for map navigation and information retrieval about single features.
Technical aspects
The information system is based on the Internet Map Server ArcIMS from ESRI running on an Apache Web Server and a Tomcat Servlet Engine. By default, ArcIMS offers two viewers: an HTML viewer and a Java viewer. For this system the HTML viewer was used and the user does not need to download an applet. In order to adjust the design of the viewer to the design of the internet pages of the city of Münster and to provide the required functionality, the HTML and JavaScript code provided by the default viewer has been adapted.