The discovery of existing environmental data and the collection of the related meta-data based on a consistent and standard method is a priority. Yet a common problem faced by public and private organisations involved in environmental impact assess-ment in Italy, is the lack of information about existing environmental data, particu-larly at local and regional level. A survey of environmental data sources for the terri-tory of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region has been carried out for the local Regional Authority with the purpose of discovering data sources relevant to environmental impact assessment with priority for geographic and non-geographic datasets.
The analysis of the most common metadata standards used to describe environ-mental data has shown that the ISO 19115 standard is suitable for the description of environmental information resources. Some aspects that could improve the applica-bility of the ISO norm in the environmental domain are presented. A profile for dis-covery metadata was developed to allow a standard description of data sources that is applicable to geographic and non-geographic datasets and was implemented in an ISO compliant meta-database.
