S18: Environmental Informatics: History and Current Trends
Organisers
Topics
- Environmental Informatics? A mature interdiciplinary science
- Material Flow Analysis for Ecoefficiency with Material Flow Networks - Concepts and Casestudy
- Environmental Information Systems in Public Administration: State and Trends
- Environmental Information Systems in Business Applications – Illustrations from Communication and Reporting
- Environmental Informatics, Environmetrics, Chemoinformatics, Chemometric: Integration or Separation!?
Description
Up until the mid-1980ies, there was no scientific community specializing in information technology for environmental purposes. Those active in the field either followed IT communities independent of special areas of use, such as database systems, real-time computing or Geographic Information Systems (GIS), or joined specific areas of application, such as environmental planning, environmental chemistry or forestry science, just to name a few. A Technical Committee on “Informatics for Environmental Protection” was founded in 1987 within the German “Gesellschaft für Informatik” (GI, Society of Informatics) in an effort to establish continuity and improvement in communication among the participants and to broaden the community. Since that date the “EnviroInfo” community has continuously worked and expanded their scope in several ways on the one hand regarding the internationalization of the community and on the other hand concerning the topics. Since then, the Committee has been mainly organizing the annual EnviroInfo conference, publishing a newsletter for the community, establishing special interest groups and working groups to handle specific topics, as well as organizing one or more Technical Committee meetings annually. The continuous work in the EnviroInfo community is closely related to the topics treated in other societies like e.g. the iEMSs (International Environmental Modelling and Software Society), the TIES (The International Environmetrics Society), the work in Chemoinformatics and Chemometrics, etc. However, some different aspects as well as other foci can be distinguished. In this Session we will give an overview on the work which has been performed over the last two decades. Furthermore some examples of current research and developments in the field of Environmental Informatics will be given including an outlook.