The European environment – state and outlook 2010 (powered by Plone)

SOER 2010

"SOER 2010 provides a set of assessments of the current state of Europe's environment, its likely future state, what is being done and what could be done to improve it, how global megatrends might affect future trends… and more."

Plone powers the environment

In this project Plone plays a big role since it is EEA's main CMS for the public website. The SOER report is today a sub site with content from EU  and neighborhood countries. Two third of the countries uploaded content manually through Plone CMS and 1/3 through RDF feeds as part of the SENSE project. The 13 SENSE countries used their own CMSs where Plone was one of them in at least 3 countries. Most of them used the eea.soer/eea.rdfmarshaller products developed by us for EEA but Italy also had own products for their Plone site.

From static paper to full traceability

The goal of the SENSE project was to give countries more control over their content and possibility to update it continuously and give the readers full traceability to data sources. This has not fully been achieved but it is on it good way and discussions have started in many countries how to make the underlying data available to the public.

Now when the report is launched the discussions are already going on how to continue the work with many other 'sharing information' projects like INSPIRE and SEIS. We hope that more RDF and Linkeddata projects will be the outcome of this.

RDF and Linkeddata in Plone

For this project two products were developed, eea.rdfmarshaller which is a generic RDF marshaller (export only as of today) for any Archetype content. You just add /@@rdf to the url or use a RDF browser which sends correct Accept headers and you will get the content as RDF. With this approach we have enabled any Plone site to speak RDF and we can easy create connections between Linkeddata RDF storages or Plone sites powered by eea.rdfmarshaller.

RDF marshaller allows custom adapters which were utilized in eea.soer to generate specific RDF output in the SOER/SENSE project.

Make websites and make difference

I, Sasha Vincic have been working with EEA for over 6 years and recently I decided that it is time for me and my company to find new projects. The environment, economy and health are important topics and listening to Prof. Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the EEA, Janez Potočnik, European Commissioner for the Environment and specially Jo Leinen, Chairman of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety i was inspired and proud of have been part of the web team at EEA for so many years. Last time I was this inspired this much was at the Eben Moglen's keynote at Plone conference 2006 where he talked about how open source really can make difference in the world. Time to make some difference.

The European environment – state and outlook 2010 (powered by Plone)