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Federal Department of the Environment,

Transport, Energy and Communications DETEC

Federal Office for the Environment FOEN

Environmental Indicators

(Swiss Experience)

26.6.2012

Division

2Swiss Indicators| Karin Fink

Agenda

1. Indicators & Reporting: Indicators as a basis for

environmental reporting

2. Indicator Management: Technical solution for indicator

management

3. Some Thoughts+: Open Issues about SENSE-II


Indicators & Reporting I:The Swiss definition of an indicator I

• Criteria

• Policy relevance

• Representative

• Understandable , unique and clear

• Target availability

• Data availability and regular monitoring

• Spatial and temporal coverage

• Methodological soundness

• Internationally comparable

Many (all?) points in common with EEA Indicators, other national

indicators?


Indicators & Reporting I:The Swiss definition of an indicator II

• One dataset

• One value per year

• Available for several years

• Assessment

• „Traffic lights“


Indicators & Reporting I: Role of indicators

Indicators are basically used for two purposes:

• Steering environmental observation (DPSIR flowers)• Setting the Agenda: What must be measured?

• Distribution of financial means

• Environmental Reporting: Products for the public and

policy makers


Indicators & Reporting II: Reporting Products

Indicators as a basis for different reporting products:

Online Reporting

• Indicator portal: http://www.bafu.admin.ch/umwelt/indikatoren/index.html?lang=en

• Environmental Status Reports Onlinehttp://www.bafu.admin.ch/umwelt/status/index.html?lang=en


Indicators & Reporting: Reporting Products

Print products

• Environment Switzerland

• Thematic reports


Indicator Management: Indicator Database I

• MS SQL Database

• Web-Frontend

• Search functions


Indicator Management:Indicator Database II

• Indicator Metadata

• Indicator Assessment

• Data

• 4 languages (D, F, I, E)


Indicator Management:Publishing Tool

• Indicators are published through

PENTAHO (open source BI Tool)

• Graph Parameters can be chosen

• HTML is optimized for

screenreaders

• Every update directly published

from database into indicator portal


Indicator Management:Workflow

• Still a lot of off-line work needed

• Possible to generate wordfiles to track changes!

• Close contact to experts

• Difficult for experts to simplify „their“ topics

• Difficult to choose the traffic light

• Time consuming to be up-to-date!


Some Thoughts) about matching indicators)

• Question raised @ NRC SOER workshop on SENSE-II

content: What does „matching“ mean?


These hibernating friends finally want to see the

snow!

The goat delivered the metadata /assessment for

snow:

• white

• cold

• wet

• soft, sometimes hard

• sparkling


The hedgehog found the first snowflake!

Its cold, white, wet, a bit hard, a bit soft +


It‘s snow according to Switzerland+


It‘s sparkling, cold, white and wet! Snow according to you?


EEA knows how snow looks like!


Relevance for SENSE-II?

• What content do we want to compare between

countries?

• Are Swiss and EEA indicators worth a comparison in SOER Part

C? And what would such a comparison mean?

• Importance for assessments?

• How should differences be addressed in SOER Part C?

• What can be learned from these differences?

• Impacts on technical solutions?

• One to many relations+

• Many to many relations+

• Feed generation out of a database?

• National directives for presentation!

• Reuse existing content!


A last picture to refresh your minds.+

Snow looks beautiful in RDF!

Thank you!

Paintings by: © Sebastian Meschenmoser, Herr Eichhorn und der erste Schnee, Essliger Verlag 2010

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